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YouTube Turns Up The Heat On Hulu

J.R. Bookwalter — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:20:42 -0600

The battle for online cinema dominance has been heating up in recent months. YouTube, once a vast, wild West-style wasteland full of dancing babies and funny animal videos, is going in a more commercial direction with advertising and even full-length motion pictures and TV shows in an effort to compete with other free services such as Hulu.

It was only a year ago that YouTube announced partnerships with studios such as MGM and Lionsgate as well as a number of independent labels, bringing older catalog films such as Super Size Me and A Fistful of Dollars to eager viewers. Since then, more content from channels such as PBS, Shout! Factory and Starz Media (i.e., Anchor Bay) have been added to the fray. YouTube is also rumored to be working with Sony and Warner Bros. in an effort to make newer titles available as well.

Like Hulu, for now YouTube is offering such streaming media for free, including advertising links to vendors such as Amazon.com and iTunes. But recent reports claim that YouTube is negotiating with major Hollywood studios to kick things up a notch with a pay-per-view model.

“If a deal is reached, it would be a major change for YouTube, which has largely offered free content supported by advertising,” the New York Times reported back in September. “It would also put YouTube, which is owned by Google, in direct competition with services from Netflix, Amazon and Apple, which allow users to buy or rent movies online.”

Competitor Hulu, a joint venture by NBC Studios and News Corp., has far less viewers than Google-owned YouTube, but thanks to its ever-expanding catalog of film and television content, Hulu has actually been more profitable thus far than YouTube. With recent rumors swirling about Hulu being reworked into a pay-per-view or subscription service instead of an ad-based model, all eyes will be on YouTube to see how they respond to such a threat.

YouTube Cutting Off API Access To Set-Top Boxes

J.R. Bookwalter — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:00:34 -0600

Since Google purchased YouTube, the wildly popular video sharing site has endured a number of growing pains as it works to reinvent itself into a more commercial-minded portal. One of those pains came to light this week as YouTube announced it’s cutting off API access to at least one maker of set-top boxes tied to televisions.

The move comes as YouTube is ramping up its efforts to insert advertising into the service in an effort to monetize content and share the rewards with their creators. But it’s grim news for companies like Syabas, who makes a set-top box called Popcorn Hour.

Apparently, Syabas and YouTube had a “loose” agreement allowing the company to stream content for free, with YouTube having the freedom to change the terms of the deal at will, which they have now done.

“As a result of Google’s decision, Syabas is no longer allowed to access YouTube through its APIs,” company COO Alex Limberis explains. “To be clear, Syabas is not being singled out. With the exception of a few strategic partners Google has chosen to work with, the company has informed Syabas they are asking all over-the-top device makers that are currently connecting to YouTube content through its APIs to take down the service.”

The API is important, since it’s what allows a device to access the content directly, rather than through its regular Flash-based web interface, explains Gizmodo. Come December 2nd, Google is shutting off the tap.

For their part, YouTube claims it’s just business as usual. “Since July of 2008, YouTube’s Terms of Service has restricted implementations for television based on our APIs,” a statement reads. “YouTube has been in active discussions with various developers on how best to implement YouTube on set-top boxes and TVs. Companies that have negotiated agreements to use our APIs, like TiVo, Sony, Panasonic and Sony’s PS3 are not impacted.”

“There are several companies, however, that have deployed solutions, like video scraping technology, to circumvent and violate YouTube’s Terms of Service,” the statement concludes.

1080p HD Coming to YouTube

Brian Proffit — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:36:40 -0600

YouTube announced that starting next week they will be adding support for full 1080p videos. "As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content," the announcement said. "For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience."

Sounds great, right? But 1080p videos are going to take significantly more bandwidth, and some are already complaining about buffering delays. Another issue is that in an attempt to keep bandwidth down, YouTube appears to be lowering the audio quality noticeably. They also limit the audio sampling to 44Khz @ 16 bit rather than 48Khz.

In our look at their sample video the quality was beautiful but it was jerky with frequent pauses. To be fair, though, there were probably lots of others like us trying to watch the only 1080p sample available right now. Our numbers seemed to indicate around 3.6mbps and 128kbps audio. There may be some pressure to improve quality from their new partners at CBS, MGM, Sony, Lions Gate Entertainment, and the BBC.

This is a perfect opportunity to find out if your broadband provider is really giving the advertised throughput. No word from YouTube on whether they expect users to restrict 1080p to uploads of things we actually want to see clearly.

Vimeo Shows Some Love To iPhones (And Android, Too)

J.R. Bookwalter — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:49:52 -0600

Vimeo has been a popular high-quality alternative to YouTube, particularly with content publishers and bloggers. Unfortunately, uploading videos to Vimeo has left one particular (and rather large) group of potential viewers in the dark: iPhones.

Like many video upload sites, Vimeo relies on Adobe Flash for its content delivery. YouTube got around this limitation by also offering iPhone-friendly H.264 versions of its content in addition to Flash. Not wanting to leave out a large swath of users, Vimeo has begun to make the same transition, much to the jubilant cries of bloggers everywhere.

“We’ve been working on it for the last few weeks,” the company proclaimed today. “This is sort of the prelude of offering Plus members iPhone support; and in the future, an app.” For now, Vimeo is focusing strictly on making its Staff Picks and HD video showcases iPhone-friendly, but that situation will change soon enough: “In the future, like the next several weeks — maybe longer, we’ll be offering Plus users the option to transcode their videos to an iPhone version too.”

Of course, the Vimeo love-fest isn’t exclusive to the iPhone — Android users can also get in on the fun. But as Danny Allen at Gizmodo points out, that may not be a big issue with Flash 10.1 on the way — although the verdict is still out on whether iPhone users will have something else to rejoice about when that time comes.

Band Shoots Music Video Using Photo Booth and MacBooks

Cory Bohon — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:17:29 -0500

It has been said that many musicians use Macs to produce their music, but we've yet to hear about a band using 21 MacBooks to create a music video. That is until now.

This Is a Shakedown! produced a music video for their song "Circles" using 21 borrowed MacBooks and the Photo Booth software that comes pre-installed.

The end product is quite amazing for using only the built-in cameras and the color-pencil effect in Photo Booth. You can watch the video below, but be warned that the video has a strobe effect that may cause seizures in certain individuals.

Now we're just waiting for that awesome feature length film to be produced using Photo Booth.

Add Flash Videos to Your iWeb Pages

Steve Paris — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:06:44 -0600

If you use YouTube to convert your videos to Flash, you can post them on your iWeb site, and the video files stay on YouTube’s server, not yours.

The iLife suite makes it easy to create a home movie, convert it to QuickTime, add it to a webpage using iWeb, and publish it for all to see. However, while the H.264 format used during the conversion process produces high-quality films, they can be quite large, especially compared to Flash videos.

We’ll show you how to add Flash videos to an iWeb page instead of bulkier QuickTime movies, using YouTube as a go-between. This technique offers the added advantage of using YouTube’s bandwidth and storage space instead of your own—a useful bonus, especially if your website becomes popular.

What you need: iMovie ’08 (version 7.1.4, part of iLife ’08, $79, www.apple.com), iWeb ’08 (version 2.0.4, part of iLife ’08), YouTube account (free, www.youtube.com), Some videos to publish

1. Something to Share

iMovie ’08 can send videos from your Project Library directly to YouTube.

First launch iMovie. Use one of your existing projects, or create one from scratch by dragging video clips from the Source Video (at the bottom of the screen) to the Project area (at the top). When you’ve completed a short film that you’re happy with, make sure it’s the one currently displayed (otherwise click on it in the Project Library section at the top left) and go to Share > YouTube.

2. Do You YouTube?

A free YouTube account lets you upload videos, plus make Favorites lists, rate videos, leave comments, and more.

Click Add to the right of the Account field to type in your YouTube account. If you don’t yet have one, you need to make a small detour to your Web browser and go to youtube.com. (If you already have a YouTube account, go straight to Step 3.) Click the Sign Up link at the top right of the landing page. Fill in all the requested information and click Create Account when ready. As is customary with any website login account, you’ll have to confirm your address by replying to an email sent to you by YouTube. Once that’s done, you’re ready to upload your video.

3. Sizing It Up

The gray letter i can tell you how big the video file will be.

Back in iMovie, enter your YouTube credentials, then fill in the info fields. For the best possible quality video, click the Medium button in the Size To Publish section. To see what size your video file will be once it’s encoded (which affects how fast it’ll download to your viewers’ computers), mouse over the grayed letter i to the right of the dimension. If you think that the film’s file size will be too big, opt for the smaller Mobile size. Checking Make This Movie Private will let you share it with a maximum of 25 people (customizable in your YouTube account). Click Next, read YouTube’s reminder not to share copyrighted material, and click Publish.

4. Visiting Your Video

Once iMovie sends your video to YouTube, this Visit link appears.

Still in iMovie, select your uploaded film in the Project Library and notice the small Published To YouTube banner at the top of the Project section. Click the Visit button at the far right of that banner to send your browser directly to the YouTube page hosting your video.

5. The Customizing Cog

Click the little cog by the Embed link.

Once there, you need to find the Embed link, located to the right of the video itself. Don’t copy it just yet: You have at your disposal a few options to customize the way the video will look when added to your website by clicking on the little cog wheel to the right of that Embed field.

6. Modifiable Visuals

The YouTube video player will eventually be on your own iWeb page, so it might as well look nice.

Usually, when a video finishes playing, you’re greeted with a selection of other films to watch. To keep that from happening, click the Don’t Include Related Videos button. You can also choose colors for the video player’s timeline and its border or remove the border entirely. Select the look that best matches the page you’re designing in iWeb. Once you like how the player looks, click the Embed field to select the code to its right and copy it (Command-C or Edit > Copy).

7. iWeb Snippet

The Embed link you copied is just HTML, so add it to iWeb as an HTML Snippet.

You’re now ready for iWeb. Select the page you’re building for your video (or create one from scratch). Go to Insert > HTML Snippet. A small see-through window appears with a large text field bearing the words Paste Or Type HMTL To Embed On Your Page. Click that field, paste the code taken from the YouTube page (Command-V or Edit > Paste), and click Apply.

8. Browser View

Your video stays stored on YouTube’s server, but visitors can watch it right on your page.

Your video will appear in a few seconds. You can drag the player anywhere on your page, but that’s it—you can’t rotate it, change its opacity, or even add a reflection or a shadow to it. You don’t need to finish and publish your webpage to see if the link works: Double-click on it to download the video straight into iWeb. If you’d rather see the end result in a Web browser instead, publish your site (either to MobileMe or to a folder on your hard drive) and visit the page using your favorite browser.

The Revolution Will Be YouTubed

Roberto Baldwin — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:45:06 -0500

You’ve finished your cinematic masterpiece and now you have to tackle the biggest problem facing filmmakers today: How do you distribute your video to the plethora of available outlets: DVDs, iPods, iPhones, the Internet, and God forbid, Zunes. Considering the number of codecs and video formats out there, getting your brain wrapped around all of them can be an exercise in futility. Don’t fret, future Antonioni, we’re here to weed out all the excess and you give you the information you need to get your film seen now without the need for a degree in video engineering.

He’s the codec, I’m the wrapper.

Before we get waist deep in the codecs with names that sound like weapons from a bad cold-war thriller, we need to clear up a common misconception. MOV, FLV, and AVI, are not codecs. These are formats of video that are commonly called containers, or wrappers. Containers contain streams of media, both audio and video. These streams usually consist of two audio streams (for left- and right-channel stereo) and one video stream. The audio and video media within this container will usually have compression applied to them that is independent of the other. In other words, your audio compression can be independent of your video compression. A good example of this is a music video versus a video with strictly talking and no music. Both videos would have the same video codec to optimize picture quality, but their audio quality would be different. The music video would use a codec suited for music, giving you a wider range of audio with little compression, while the video with just talking could use an audio compression with less audio range in order to shrink the file size and save bandwidth.

It’s best to experiment. But before you dive into the hundreds of compression options out there, let’s get caught up on the current state of video output options.

DVDs

The best way to ensure that someone can view your media is to put it on a DVD—the discs are cheap and almost everyone has a DVD player. DVD video is based on the MPEG-2 codec. (MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group. The group standardized MPEG-2 to transport video and audio for HDTV and DVD.)

Most video-editing applications give you the option to output your video for DVD burning. Be sure to choose the appropriate DVD size when exporting—a dual-layer DVD holds 8.5GB while a single-layer DVD can hold 4.7GB.

If your editing app doesn’t have DVD or MPEG-2 video output options, your DVD-authoring app will. Toast, iDVD, and DVD Studio Pro will all encode videos for DVD authoring. Choose Dual-Pass when encoding—the app will check each frame twice, in order to compress it for best results.

iPods

The various video-capable iPods (and the iPhone) use one of the latest implementations of MPEG-4, called H.264. Also known as MPEG-4 Part 10/AVC, the codec H.264 allows higher-quality videos at lower file sizes without being too complex. This efficiency is the reason your iPod videos look so crisp without taking up gigs of space.

To get your movie onto an iPod, you can use QuickTime Pro ($29.99, www.apple.com) and export using the iPod option. Or you can use iSquint (free, www.isquint.org), which is quicker and cheaper, and has a funny name.

The Internet

How would we know what fanatical Britney Spears followers feel or the plight of Chad Vader if not for the Internet and the videos on it? YouTube is the first logical step on your path to Internet superstardom. But if you try to post your 8GB video to the site, realize that by the time it uploads and gets converted, your video may not be as topical as it once was. YouTube recommends 640-by-480-pixel MPEG-4 videos with MP3 audio. Fortunately, those specs are almost in line with iPod videos. Just convert your video to iPod specifics using QuickTime Pro or iSquint.

If you’d rather steer clear of YouTube, you have a few options. The easiest is to place a MOV file on your site. QuickTime Pro and iMovie both give you the option to export to the Web. These videos are generally 320 by 240 pixels and use the H.264 video codec and AAC or MP3 for audio. If you’re adventurous and want to tweak the settings yourself, try to keep the bit rate (the rate per second that video is delivered) below 300 kbps (kilobits per second) for video and below 100 kbps for audio. A framerate of 15 frames per second is adequate for video, and audio should sound fine at 32KHz. These settings are for broadband connections and can be adjusted lower for dial-up friends who still happen to live in caves and eat food without the benefit of fire to cook it.

If you have Flash installed on your machine, you can create Flash video, or FLV, with QuickTime Pro using the above settings. Or you can import a video into Adobe Flash ($699.95, www .adobe.com), and the app will ask you a few questions about how you plan on using the media and will encode it appropriately. If you’re thinking about using Flash videos on your site you might as well upload the video to YouTube and use the embed code available for each video and place it on your own site.

Video Terms and Their Common Uses

MPEG-2 DVD file format
MPEG-1 VCD (video CD) file format
MPEG-4 part 2 Used for DiVX, Xvid, FFMPEG, 3ivx files
MPEG-4 part 10 Also known as H.264 AVC; used by iPod and other media devices as well as HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs
Sorenson 3 Old QuickTime codec, was replaced by implementation of H.264
Sorenson Spark Common Flash video codec
WMV Windows proprietary codec
RealVideo Developed by RealNetworks and rarely used anymore

Pure Digital Flip Video Ultra

David Biedny — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:49:00 -0600

Instant video gratification.

Choosing - and then mastering - a digital video camera that sets you back over $300 is an intimidating task, even for the experienced videographer. Or you can spend less than a couple hundred bucks on the effortless Flip Video Ultra, an inexpensive, compact camcorder designed to be as easy to use as possible. The Flip is a truly shining example of a device that delivers on the promise of technology that can be used by anyone.

The Flip comes with 1GB or 2GB of flash memory for storing video (and it can also double as a portable hard drive for any type of file). Since the camera doesn’t waste energy on moving parts, you can get over 6 hours of recording and playback time with a pair of AA lithium batteries, or over 2 hours with alkaline batteries. The controls are sparse, with all the important functionality contained in a handful of buttons. The big red button stops and starts recording, a combo controller surrounding the record button delivers file navigation, there are 2x zoom and volume controls, and the two remaining buttons control playback and file deletion.

A small speaker is built in (but no headphone jack), and the camera can be hooked right into a television’s composite connectors using a bundled cable. The screen is sharp, though not as wonderful as the current iPod screens, but it does display the remaining recording time quite accurately. The Flip lacks a visual battery meter, so keep some spare batteries handy.

It’s incredibly easy to get up and running, and while the 640-by-480-pixel resolution, 30-frames-per-second video won’t put any HD cameras out of business, the overall quality is good enough for Web work, family outings, and letting the kids have a try at guerrilla filmmaking. We were a little less than thrilled with the audio quality - you’ll need to be close to your subjects for healthy signal levels - but it’s totally serviceable for the intended audience.

Getting your video out of the camera is cake: a USB plug swings out of the side, letting you plug the entire camera right into your Mac. The camera shows up in the Finder, where you’ll see the installer for loading the 3ivx MPEG-4 5.0 Decoder QuickTime codec on your Mac, which lets you edit and play the native AVI files that come off the Flip. Drag the movies onto a hard drive, load them up in iMovie or any other video editor, and chop away. There’s an application that makes it easy to preview, rename, and do basic edits on the videos when they’re still on the camera and then upload them directly to YouTube. This might be enticing for total newbies, but it’s of less interest to anyone comfortable with iMovie.

The reviewed Flip Video Ultra model has some significant advantages over the standard Flip Video model ($139.99 for 60 minutes), including double the video data rate (delivering noticeably better video quality) and a higher-resolution screen that works a bit better in outdoor lighting conditions. It also includes a tripod mounting thread, crucial for smooth video captures. And won’t someone please figure out how to hack the Flip into a webcam?

The bottom line. The Flip Video Ultra is simply perfect for folks who want the kind of immediate gratification they would normally get from watching television, making this a perfect gift for aspiring videographers and anyone seeking instant video enlightenment. It’s a seriously cool video gadget that delivers a big bang in a small, inexpensive package.

COMPANY: Pure Digital

CONTACT: www.theflip.com

PRICE: $149.99 (30 minutes recording time), $179.99 (60 minutes)

REQUIREMENTS: 1GHz G4 or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, 512MB RAM

Low price. Absolute ease of use. Decent image quality.

No battery meter. Audio quality could be better.