Video Blog Update

Ah… back to old timey blogging where you have to read. Compatibility issues are definitely not a problem in this format… which is more than I can say about video blogging. Although, there technically can be user compatibility issues. You have to be able to read English in order to understand what I’m saying. That’s an interesting concept.

At any rate, I thought I’d tell you a little about my journey and where I’ve ended up so far.

My goal was to set up the easiest possible way to video blog (otherwise I wouldn’t do it). I also wanted it to be compatible with the most amount of computers because I know that the few readers I have are on many different kinds of machines. My mom uses Compuserve dial up. My friend Geoff is a major Linux guy and Barbara Brown at Brownwoodfish.com is a Mac person. I’m pretty sure that’s 90% of my audience 🙂 So I wanted to be sure they all could come and enjoy my insane personal videos. So, trying to make this accessible to a wide array of platforms was crucial.

That was pretty much it: Easy and accessible.

You would think that shouldn’t be a problem. Well it’s a major problem.

The easiest thing to do was to take video from my digital camera, process it through Windows movie maker and upload it. I could make super small files so anyone could see them. And there is a cool plugin for WordPress that let’s me embed them directly on the page: Fallen Media Filter

You just add a small piece of code around the url to the file and poof! it was embedded on the page. That was the first thing I did two days ago. I thought all my troubles were over. The problem came when I tried to check these videos out on my old laptop that is running Ubuntu Linux It didn’t recognize the embed. I thought that would be no big deal… I would just give a link to the file and then anybody who was having difficulty with the embedded file could simply download it. Apparently Ubuntu has difficulty with Windows Movie files. It’s a long story, but being able to access them is not native to Ubuntu.

I tried Avid Free DV But? it was more than I needed and I didn’t want to learn another piece of software. This was getting too far away from my Easy goal.

So then I started looking into the hosted option. I went to 3 places:

YouTube

Google Video

vSocial

I first tried YouTube and vSocial. Setting up an account was easy. And uploading was easy. But my first videos took over an hour to come up. That might have been because it was a new account. I’ve been working with YouTube today and my videos are accessible almost instantly. So that’s cool.

Google actually told me I didn’t have permission to use the video I had. So I gave up on that rather quickly. I wasn’t in the mood for a fight that I owned the crappy video you’ve been seeing so far on this site.

The great thing about these tools is that I can seem to play them on any computer. They use their own proprietary software to stream the video. That was the other thing, it streamed the video instead of having to download the whole thing first.

There are also some nice plugins for WordPress to use with these.

I tried:

Extreme Video Plugin 2.0 beta
Supports:
You Tube Support
Google Advanced Player Support
Support for any FLV
Quick time MOV Support

To use it you simply write something like this:
(gv data=?kwbCk_lBo8E?)(/gv)
use [] instead of ()

That’s easy.

And I’ve also tried this:

Video Blogger Plugin

This plugin allows for simple video blogging of content hosted by Google Video, YouTube, and vSocial

To display the actual Video in the post body, place ?!vb:videosourceswitch,videoid,[thumbnailindex]!? (without the quotes) anywhere in the body. videosourceswitch = gv for Google Video, yt for YouTube, vs for vSocial, dm for Dailymotion. videoid = your video id from step 4.

I really liked “video blogger plugin” but at first, it wasn’t playing in on my page. I had to go to the hosted site. But now it’s working.

Both of these options are accessible both in Windows and Linux. So, I’ve gotta believe they would be accessible on a Mac.

They only downside to these is that they are hosted. Hosted worries me because I’m afraid one day these sites are just going to shut down and I’ll lose all my video. That happened to me with MP3.com back in that day.

I love the fact that I can just upload my .avi file from my camera and they can instantly stream it. That’s cool.

So that’s my 3 day journey.

Let me know if you are interested in trying any of this yourself. I’d be happy to help.

Cheers!