What got me into this hobby was Marc Spanuolo's site
The Wood Whisperer. He has a lot of videos and they are entertaining to boot.
I wasn't able to do much woodworking for personal reasons last year so I replaced shop time with TV time. Certainly wasn't my choice. Like Eiji said, though, no substitute for shop time; even if you go down a squirrel hole and 4 hours later you have nothing but firewood, you learned something along the way. That said, though, videos will teach you a lot in a hurry if you try out what you learned.
So here's the results of a year of too much video and not enough shop:
For a cool variety of videos, I subscribed to SmartFlix's Woodworking University. If you sign up for it, you can view the list of DVDs you'll get along the way and you can cancel any of them so you don't get them in a monthly mailing. Works like NetFlix in that you watch them and return them after a week or so. Subscription varies, but I have the 3-DVD per month and they seem to have been well picked and on a huge variety of subjects (not all of the videos are on a subtopic that interests me, but you can see the video is clearly a good one on that topic... then again, I pick up something from all of them).
Of the Lie-Nielsen videos, the one by George Walker on design is exemplary. I have not yet ordered the one on moldings, but will. The Schwarz videos are all great. David Charlesworth can put me to sleep even after a bucket of espresso. Knowledgeable, but he's the cure for insomniacs.
Charles Neil has done a lot of free clips on YouTube. He also has a huge DVD library. I have most of them. PM me if you see one and want an honest opinion. Those made in the past year/year and a half have better recording. Earlier ones have content, but were definitely rougher on the edges.
I joined his guild program when he started it. It did a project build from design to final finish with every step along the way including a lot of coverage of pitfalls, avoiding mistakes, and fixing them. Every Thursday, he releases a 60-90 minute show on the build; well edited, good organization, and honestly dense with good info. Runs something like $20/month for 4-6 hours of great coverage; that's cheap. At the end of the build, you can buy a DVD set with all the episodes for basically cost. Go to
Mastering Woodworking with Charles Neil for a bit of an intro. I think if you surf around, there are clips from the first build (a corner cabinet). The second is nearing the end of the build (a low-boy). If you go to his DVD store, you could buy the first build, which comes at the same cost as you would have paid for the monthly subscription plus DVD cost... it's 19 DVDs. PM me if you have more questions; sorry if it sounds like a commercial, but I was very pleased with the result and can say I get more in his 1 hour episode that I can put to work daily than I do in any other video.
Plus you can master some Southern slang and practice your Southern accent. Hey, who's hungry for chicken and waffles?
