youtube

5 months later and Nokia N8 video still doesn't work on flickr. Interestingly, N8 video works fine on YouTube. I think this is symptomatic of both the decline and irrelevance of both flickr and Nokia that they can't get video working with Nokia's flagship phone.

Oh well ! Onwards! I have 200 N8 videos that I'd like to batch re-encode so that they *do* work on flickr. what's the best way to do this on Mac OS X. FFMpeg?

p.s. Nokia N8 and flickr: I still love you both :-) Luckily I can handle this video issue; I couldn't handle it if there was a similar issue with photos!

I was wrong on my previous post. All you need is the magical URL:
http://m.youtube.com/?client=ytdemo

This URL and YouTube mobile video works great on my N93. On my N80i, Real Player says "unable to use network. Phone is currently in offline mode. I have no SIM in my N80i but it should work over WiFi methinks. Bug I guess!

FROM Ring Nokia: Youtube's mobile site is live!:

QUOTE

Summary: Point you're browser to http://m.youtube.com/?client=ytdemo

END QUOTE

m.YouTube.com doesn't work on my N80i or N93. Quelle surprise. Fingers crossed that it will eventually.

FROM Tommi's S60 applications blog:

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Symbian-Guru and Symbian-Freak found via HowardForums the YouTube Mobile site that Nokia announced back at 3GSM.

The URL apparently is "m.youtube.com"

END QUOTE

In a completely unscientific test, I took this original MPEG-4 video from a Drupal 5 screencast I made using Snapz Pro X and then uploaded it to blip.tv, Google Video, YouTube and Brightcove Consumer.

In the original MPEG-4 you can clearly make out the text. Only Brightcove's transcoded flash video has legible text. In the others, the text is very blurry and almost unreadable. I don't know anything about transcoding but could the fact that Brightcove transcodes to a slightly bigger size explain the fact that its text is not as blurry as the others?

Does this mean I'll switch to Brightcove Consumer for all my video? No! Why? Because I need the Creative Commons licensing and original file options that blip.tv gives me. And if anybody can improve their transcoding, blip.tv can!

See for yourself after the jump if you don't believe me!

blip.tv:

Click To Play

Google Video:

YouTube:

Brightcove Consumer:

Thomas Hawk does a review of 2006 predictions and writes:

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10. Roland Tanglao: No Flickr of video emerges.

There was this little site called YouTube.

UNQUOTE

I guess it depends on what you mean by "flickr of video". For me (and I wasn't clear of course :-) !) it means innovation, the flickr API and that "wabi sabi" that the flickr team and community has that none of the video sharing services have including YouTube.

All YouTube did well was their flash interface to video.

In my opinion, YouTube is the "Yahoo photos of video" not the flickr of video. No disrespect to the team at YouTube intended! What the YouTube did was amazing but it doesn't compare to what flickr did. YMMV, etc!

The N93 Video is impressive but it takes a lot space. 100MB for 5 minutes. So, it's quite the chain of pain to get the video and share it (yeah I know you could compress it but that takes too much time!) since most sharing services e.g.blip.tv and revver only accept 100MB videos. My 5 minute video above of the Skyte is well over 100MB. Luckily, Google Video has no limit (but the average non techie non geek person is not going to go through the hoops that I went through to post on Google Video; they'll want something easier like YouTube; now that Google owns YouTube perhaps the limits will be raised!).

Nokia needs to address this in future video phones probably by running a companion web service (or partnering with one) and also doing more compression in hardware.

I want one. LazyWeb: hack this to work with S3 and Drupal and I'm in . This would be a great hack for BarCamp Vancouver.

FROM How to create your own YouTube site - Flash Insider:

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Have you ever wanted to know how you can create your own video hosting site allowing users to upload video, automatically convert it to FLV, and display it for the world to see? A recent post at Daniel's Random Mutterings (DRM - how clever) explains exactly how to do this with open source tools. Using a Djano CMS system, FFMpeg for the FLV encoding, FLVtools2 for writing meta information, and FlowPlayer for embedding the SWF file you'll have everything you need to get started. The code is pretty straight forward and a great starting point. Now go forth and create your new video distribution empire.

END QUOTE

YouTube Mobile Uploading doesn't work in Canada, *sigh*. Well at least it doesn't work with Fido (in my experiments anyway. I'd love to be proven wrong) since Fido MMS can only handle 300K and most videos are at least 1MB.

Supporting MMS is ridiculous, YouTube! Nobody uses MMS in North America (well at least no adults, youths and crazy Web 2.0 people that I know). Please support video upload using email like the fantastic blip.tv does!

FROM TechCrunch » YouTube Mobile Uploading:

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YouTube announced a new feature today that allows uploading of videos from a mobile device that supports Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). Users need to create a moblie profile before uploading videos. Sign up here.

I use my camera phone to upload pictures directly to Flickr all the time (yesterday’s banana-yellow ridiculous rental car, for example). If my phone had the ability to create video, I’d be using this for YouTube all the time, too.

END QUOTE

Unfortunately most Windows machines don't have the software to play MP4 format files so here are the Navteq Videos on YouTube re-posted (what a waste of time, somebody please solve the 8 million video format problem quickly please!) in Flash format:

1. Val Brown
2. Kevin and James Drive and Ride
3. Robert Gourdine Part 1
4. Robert Gourdine Part 2

I love my blip.tv. The most features. Grassroots and friendly support people. Now if only they added a flash widget, I'd use them instead of YouTube for all my videos.