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  • How to Improve YouTube Video Quality
  • YouTube Updates - Contextual Help and Character Counter
  • The Vlog Era Has Arrived
  • YouTube Will Add Live Video in 2008
  • Quarterlife’s Creators Says the Show isn’t Big Enough for TV
  • Pakistan Breaks YouTube
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I came across a good vlog today about improving the quality of the videos you upload to YouTube from Cory Williams (aka “Mr. Safety” - SMP Films).

The video that explains the process is pretty clear itself, especially by YouTube standards, and so I guess you can say the proof is in the pudding.

The process he outlines uses Sony Vegas Editing Software, but you could probably get other editing programs to do the trick as well.

At the end of the video he gives a rundown of the points to hit. I’ll reprint them here for convenience.

- 1mbps (speed)
- 320 x 240 (image size)
- 128 kbps audio (higher quality MP3)
- sharpest possibel setting
- 10% more brightness
- 20% more contrast (which keeps the gray from pixelating color)

Live video, or live vlogs, will be coming to YouTube in 2008. Straight from the horse’s mouth, in the video above, you can see Steve Chen of YouTube say that they are moving in that direction.

While there are already a number of places where you can vlog live, when YouTube jumps into the pool, you can be assured that the millions upon millions of vloggers they bring with them will change the live vlogging landscape.

Will we look back at 2008 as the year live vlogs went big? No doubt there’s a good chance.

See NewTeeVee for the original post of this video.

DailyMotion has recently opened up their high-def capabilities to a wider audience.

At least that’s what it seems like.

Not having followed exactly what they were offering before and to whom, it’s a little difficult to figure out exactly what’s news.

Here’s what they say:

For more than a year-and-a-half we have offered High-Quality video encoding, but with the rise of HD digital video cameras we have seen more and more Creative Content submitted in High Definition. This is why, from today on out, all HD video uploaded by MotionMakers will be automatically re-encoded in 720p High Definition for playback on the site.

I guess I can’t decifer this because I don’t really know what a “MotionMaker” is. Is it anyone uploading video onto DailyMotion, or is it some special group with special privileges?

In any case, the time-lapsed video above is an HD video of the Paris skyline from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m.

I am assuming that the embedded video here will play in high definition as it does on the DailyMotion site.

LINKS:

The DailyMotion High Def Video Channel

Thanks to Vimeo (teaming up with Canon), vloggers now have a place to share their high definition video.

The resolution of the videos is 720p (1280×720) — which Vimeo claims is “12 times better than the standard 320 x 240 resolution.”

Due to the increased load of high-def video, Vimeo accounts have been increased from a weekly upload limit of 250 MB to 500 MB.

Canon is helping to subsidize the costs of such an increase this year, but the Vimeo blog warns that to keep such an increase users will most likely need to pay a subscription fee starting in 2008. There’s no mention of how much that would be.

While HD video cameras and camcorders have begun falling to prices under $1,000, bandwidth, it seems, is still going to be a problem.

You can see some HD videos on Vimeo at their featured high-def section.

Google Earth and YouTube have teamed up so that you can now watch videos in the popular mapping program based on where they were created or where they take place.

In theory, this is a nice addition to Google Earth, and it seems it could actually add real value. The question becomes, however, who decides which videos actually get in for the location they are listed for?

In the picture at the top of this post, there is a video of July 4th fireworks on the National Mall in Washington D.C. The YouTube icon found on the map is pinned on the Washington Monument, smack dab in the middle of the Mall. This, obviously, is how the system is supposed to work.

If you move on up the Mall to the Capitol, however, the only YouTube icon currently pinned onto the august rotunda of that building gives us a video of … Star Trek.

Even the most enthusiastic Trekkie would admit that this, alas, is not how the system should work.

One has to wonder how long it will be before this interesting feature will be completely over-run with spam.

Although there may be an editing system in place, YouTube doesn’t make that clear. They simply say the following:

You can tag your video with a location during the upload process on YouTube. Simply click the “Date and Map Options” to display the maplet, then drag the marker or use the search browser to choose a specific location. Once your location is recorded, your video will appear on Google Earth.

If there is, in fact, any editorial control over this system, then I fear we already have a glimpse of how it’s going to work.

To get to the YouTube videos on your Google Earth page, you will need to go to the left-hand side to the Layers section, then to Featured Content , and then tick the option for YouTube as in the image below:

LINKS:

If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it here.

ScanScout — an interesting, new video ad service — is claiming to do for video what Google and others have done for text: search the content and then deliver relevant ads based on what they’ve found.

And it seems they are attracting both attention and money from some big players — the latest of which is Time Warner.

How It Works

As you can see in the image above, ScanScout identifies the material in the video and then serves up ads that might be of interest to viewers based on what’s being played on screen.

Another scenario of how this might play out could be the following:

• A vlogger posts a video about a Caribbean cruise. At the beginning of the vlog, ScanScout recognizes that the video is about a cruise ship. They then deliver an overlay ad for a cruise line.
• Later in the vlog, as the ship arrives in the Bahamas, an ad from the Bahamas tourism agency pops up.
• When the vlogger shoots footage of his hotel, an ad for a hotel on the islands suddenly appears.

No doubt lots of people are working on such a solution, including Google and the other major search engines. As was mentioned in an earlier post about indexing video, the ability for search engines (or anyone else) to “crack open ” a video so that its contents can be read and index by machines is extremely valuable.

Although we aren’t completely there yet, and there’s no word on how accurate ScanScout’s system is, this is definitely a peek into the future of online video.

Now, how long will it be before Google or Yahoo or MSN gobbles these guys up?

LINKS:

ScanScout

Ever wondered how you can get your video or vlog to appear in regular search results? Matt Cutts, the main representative “face” of Google for webmasters, has recently provided some keys.

Summarizing a session he and other representatives from the major search engine participated in at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference, he gives the following tips:

1. Make sure it’s on the larger video sharing sites such as YouTube.

2. Submit your video directly to the search engines. (I would also think that submitting to places like Google Video and Yahoo Video would help.)

In order to optimize you video for search engines (i.e. make it easier for search engines to identify it and pick it up in their search results), the panel recommended the following:

1. Make sure the title of your video reflects the content well.

2. Explore “Media RSS” .

3. “Make a kick-ass video.” (This, for those who don’t know, means that it will be more likely to attract links, which is what search engines like most.)

If you have a larger video site (i.e. more than a personal vlog site), and you would like your videos to be indexed, the following was recommended:

1. Make sure your videos play reliably.

2. Make sure there are no copyright issues.

3. Make sure there is no porn, etc.

The Current Problem Search Engines Have with Video

The difficulty search engines have with indexing video, of course, is that there is usually little text associated the video to tell the search engines what the content is about in an in-depth way. When someone at the conference asked the panel if the engines were working on ways to extract text from audio and video, Matt reports the following:

Everyone was silent for a while. David Bailey of Google gave the only reasonable answer that most search engine employees can give when you ask about future plans: we have researchers that work on such projects, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

Who knows how long it will be before someone has something to “announce,” but the good news is that it’s being worked on. In the end that will mean it will be easier for videos to be picked up by the engines and returned in their search results.

Blended Search / Universal Search

The larger context in which all these remarks were made was in a discussion about “blended search” (or “universal search” as Google calls it). Blended search means that when you search for something, the engines return all sorts of content: video, text, photos, blogs, news, etc. As you may have noticed, the trend towards blended search has been gaining momentum for a while now.

While vloggers may have somewhat of a disadvantage at the moment in terms getting their content represented in search results, it’s looking like the playing field is slowly beginning to level out. Therefore, the best advice from all of the above is to simply “make a kick-ass video.”

LINKS:

Matt Cutts’ Blog

Search Engine Strategies Conference

Verizon Wireless and YouTube are teaming up to make uploading video a little simpler.

Instead of managing your way through the YouTube web interface via your phone, you can now upload with an easy-to-remember code - YTUBE (the numbers - 98823).

In order to set this up, you will need to go into your YouTube account and make sure your phone number is included. “Standard messaging rates apply,” as they say.

For $15/month, you can also view YouTube videos on a v-cast phone.

In a move to make friends with vloggers, Sony has recently announced their latest camcorder, the Net-sharing CAM , designed specifially with video bloggers in mind.

What makes it so “video blogging” friendly is the compact size and the fact that you can designate certain videos or photos with a tag, and then once connected to a compatible PC, directly publish them to the web . Users of the big video sharing sites like YouTube are obviously in their sights, but you can also upload directly to an independent blog as well.

If you’re looking for something that’s easy to carry around and makes uploading video to the web quick, then it might be worth taking a look at. It might also serve as a nice “carry around” camera if your “regular” camcorder is too big to conveniently take with you all the time. (It can also serve as a webcam.)

While this isn’t a high-level camcorder with lots of bells and whistles, if you have video that you’d just like to shoot and shove to the web, it might do the trick nicely.

Some basic specs from Sony:

… seamlessly uploads short video clips to the web, and snaps print-quality, 5-megapixel digital still photos. Weighing just about five ounces, the model has ultra-portable dimensions (1 3/16 by 4 1/8 by 2 1/4 inches, W x H x D).It can record about five hours of web-ready video footage on a Memory Stick PRO Duo media card, when recording with the default settings on a 2GB media card.

The device shoots video in the “web-ready” MPEG-4 recording format, with selectable picture qualities ranging from QVGA/15 frames per second to VGA/30 frames per second, which can be viewed on televisions. It sports a distinctive “sharemark” button so users can easily “tag” or select video and photos they want to upload.

Designed to be sleek and intuitive, the Net-sharing CAM sports separate buttons for movies and photos, eliminating the need to select specific modes before shooting. It has a built-in flash, 4x digital zoom, and a 2.4-inch color LCD screen. Powered with rechargeable Lithium-ion technology, the model has a battery life of about 90 minutes (depending on recording conditions).

It runs about $200 at Amazon.

While it’s not surprising that compared to older segments of the population, young adults (18-29) are more likely to watch, upload, rate and comment on online videos, what comes as a surprise is that they are also more likely to pay for online video.

According to a recent Pew Internet survey, while only 7% of the population as a whole say that they have paid for online video, 10% of the 18-29 group say they have - the largest percentage of any of the group breakdowns in the Pew report.

The least likely group to pay for online video is older folks (aged 50-64). Perhaps they’ve already seen it all. Which raises a question, of course.

Exactly what are these 18-29 year olds paying to watch? It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that their “young adult” status might provide a clue. It also wouldn’t be hard to imagine that the male portion of that group is doing most of the buying. The report, however, doesn’t go into either of these questions … suspicions … um, allegations.

Another mild surprise is that 50-64 year olds are almost as likely to have watched online video as the 18-29 year olds — 71% for the older folks vs. 75% for the younger ones. The amount of video, and the frequency its watched isn’t included in these numbers. They are addressed in another Pew question, however, and as expected, the younger group has substantially higher percentages here.

According to the report:

Roughly one in three (31%) internet users ages 18-29 said they watched or downloaded some type of video on the day prior to our survey. Just 18% of users ages 30-49, 12% of those 50-64 and 10% of those age 65 and older watch or download any type of video on the average day.

Other interesting stats of note: 23% of 18-29 year olds have rated videos and 25% have commented on videos. Of course there’s a margin of error in the poll (+/- 3%), and one might suspect that it comes into play here. It would seem much easier to simply rate a video than comment on it, but many sites (especially independent vlogs) may not have a rating system in place. Still, the roughly 25% number for both would seem encouraging.

You can read more of the Pew report about online video viewership here.

LG Electronics, in conjunction with AT&T, releases its “multimedia” Trax phone today. This release goes hand-in-hand with AT&T’s recent launch of their wireless video-sharing service, which allows two AT&T subscribers to share video during a call.

In addition to video sharing, AT&T’s new service also includes streaming video, music downloads, and other high-speed wireless services.

The Trax phone is approximately 2 inches wide, 4 inches tall, and 1/2 inch thick. It includes a memory port for 4 gigabytes of microSD expansion storage. It supports Bluetooth wireless technology, includes a 1.3-megapixel camera, and supports in-camera photo-editing capability.

According to online reports, the phone costs about $130 after a mail-in rebate and a two-year service contract. (In polite company, this is known as “the catch.” In not-so-polite company, we refer to it as something else. .. You, loyal reader, qualify as polite company.)

The complete specs of the LG Trax phone (according to the LG website) can be found below.

Read more

Some good news out of Apple recently for vloggers who happen to have Macs - iMovie (Apple’s video editing software) has recently gotten an upgrade and a makeover.

A few of the better enhancements are highlighted below:

• “Super-fast movie creation,” as they call it, allows you to skim easily through a video at various speeds, forward or backward, starting in various places.
• When you find something from your footage you want to use, you simply select the footage in the same way you would select text. Then you simply paste that into a movie making frame.
• The default setting for the thumbnails under the main video pane is broken up into sections according to when you started and stopped recording. However you also have the ability to dig down into each section of each video and see clips broken up into thumbnails for every 10 seconds, every five seconds, or even more detailed.
• Nice title templates.
• Can publish directly to YouTube right from the iMovie interface.
• A new video library.

The new iMovie is part of the the iLife package, which includes other programs such as their photo and audio editing software. For those who already own a Mac, the iLife ’08 package is available for a suggested retail price of $79. All new Macs will come with the software included.

To see the features in action, check out the video below. To get to the nitty-gritty and bypass the very basics, like uploading a video, etc. - skip ahead to the point in the video where there is approximately 6 minutes left (about 1/3 of the way in).

LINKS:

The Apple iMovie Homepage

Dailymotion, YouTube’s competition from Europe, announced recently that you can now access their videos on an iPhone.

While the iPhone had a YouTube player already built in, Dailymotion needed to come up with their own solution. This was actually easier than making the phone compatible with YouTube because Dailymotion’s videos are Quicktime-encoded (Apple’s platform), and they run on Safari (Apple’s browser) without the need for a Flash player.

You can see how each works from the videos below.

YouTube on the iPhone:

Dailymotion on the iPhone:

One good thing about Google buying YouTube is the seemless integration with different applications. One new, interesting mashup is being able to see YouTube videos on Google maps.

If you enable the “YouTube Mapplet” plugin (just one click), you have the ablility to see markers all over the world with a corresponding YouTube video. Click the little green marker and a mini version of the video appears right on the map. You can watch the small version right there, or, of course, click through to the original YouTube page.

One nice feature is that you can search either geographically by the markers on the map, or you can click on a video preview on the left side and Google maps will take you to the location on the map.

As another way to search and find videos is added, that makes one more way to get your vlog out there to be discovered.

Get the YouTube Mapplet Plugin (click the “Add it to Map”s button)

An interesting development to watch will be how vlogs will be turned into spam. No doubt they will be. Everything on the internet eventually gets turned into spam. According to Umbria Communication, a Boulder, Colorado company, there are 80,000 blogs created every day. They also claim that about 20% of those new blogs is spam - or a splog, as they’re called (splog = spam blog).

The way that auto-created blogs have flooded the internet, I would say that 20% is not such a bad percentage. Of course it’s bad for the visitors and the search engines, but it’s probably nothing compared to what it could be, and probably will be. That said, when the majority of blogs are still authentic, you’re probably doing pretty well. A sad but true pronouncement.

But this the internet, and as long as Google and the likes of Google (I pick on them because they are currently number 1) give the power that they do to their own system of automation, there will always be a way to beat them. A system, almost by definition, can always be beat. Having a system, and giving your automated “system” the power to be the final arbiter, means that you are giving blackhat webmasters the plan for how to get to the top of their search listings. Try as you may to keep it a secret, it’s still a system, and so therefore can always be cracked because it doesn’t have the ability to make truly complex decisions.

Systems, and computers in general, are amazingly powerful - but only in certain ways. They offer a certain kind of brute strength that no human mind could practically ever achieve. And yet, even a Google computer couldn’t understand an analogy so simple an 8-year-old could understand it (unless it was programed to do so - and, of course, you can’t program for true orignality).

All that is to say, I wonder how spammers will turn vlogs into spam. Their first and probably most effective point of entry will be through vlog tags (the keywords that vloggers use to tell a potential viewer what’s contained in the vlog). As powerful as vlogs will be, this will always be the limitations of vlogs - that because they are video, they aren’t easy to sort through. Vloggers will still need to use text to bring people in because text is easily scanned. Although this prediction is probably too easy to make, here it is: the porn industry will be our first vlog spammers. In fact, I’m sure they’re up to it already.

Broadcast search provider, TVEyes, has recently announced a search feature called Podscope, “the first engine to search within a Podcast,” as their website says. Although titled “Podscope,” the company claims that it is equally efficient for for the audio portion of vlogs (video blogs). Podscope indexes each word within a vlog (and a podcast), thereby making it searchable. The company says the search engine will be available later this month.

Read more

Another free vlog host (video blog host) has opened its virtual doors - Our Media. According to the website, Our Media is “an open-source, all-volunteer, not-for-profit project.” After seven months of construction to get the project off the ground, they are now in search of software developers, people to help with taxonomy and organization, educators, and content providers. Although they warn that the site isn’t even yet in a beta stage, but an alpha stage, there are big plans ahead.

Read more

The push to bring different technologies into sync is on, and it will be good news for the movlog (mobile vlog). Taiwan’s Quanta Computer (the world’s largest producer of laptops - they make laptops for the likes of Dell, Apple, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard) have teamed up with MIT for a $20 million research project to bring together different platforms. The project is titled TParty. The T stands for Technology, but the name is meant to bring to mind the revolutionary intent of the Boston Tea Party

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According to this article at infoworld.com, Macromedia’s “technology agenda is focused on boosting Web-based video experiences.” This from the horse’s mouth (that is Macromedia) at the Flashforward2005 conference.

There’s some good news here for vloggers, of course. Flash is already a nice way to present video for a vlog (video blog), or other uses. Now that Macromedia is making it a top priority, it can only mean another good option for your vlog. All aspects of vlogging, from making the vlog, to putting it together, getting it out on the web, and viewing it in various different vlog viewers - be they a desktop computer or a mobile phone, should only get more sophisticated, if not easier.

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Here’s a good laugh from a press release by a company called BroadbandVideo: “Pricing starts at just $5 per clip, so it’s affordable enough to use almost every day. ” As companies desperately search for ways to make vlogging affordable, these guys only ask you shell out about $150 a month if you want to do a vlog a day.

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