2657 Productions News

I recently bought a new digital camera after Amy twisted my arm and made me do so. We were both looking for something small, with quick start-up time, and low shutter-lag. Personally, I was also interested in having the option to create short videos that were of a decent quality. I wasn’t exactly interested in a full featured digital camcorder, but I wanted something longer than the 15 second no-audio quicktime clip that our current camera produced.

Enter the Casio Exilim. This camera is pretty slick. To begin with, it’s tiny. It has good battery life, and a good host of features that make it pretty perfect for a point-and-shoot camera. It lacks many options for manual settings, but includes quite a few “best-shot” settings that adjusts the camera’s settings for different shooting conditions. And the videos it takes are truly awesome.

So, armed with a camera that gives me the option to make good quality videos, I started thinking about different options for presenting the videos to the public. Seeing as I now have about 7GB of space to spare, I was just expecting to upload the videos to my site and offer them myself.

Then I stumbled across Google’s video upload program. Basically, it gives you—according to their website at least—unlimited space to “broadcast” your videos. The videos are converted to Macromedia Flash video, so they are playable on pretty much any platform, and Google’s video server does a really good job of buffering your videos for uninterrupted playback.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, in recent days, it has also started adding a lot of other features that makes it even better. Unsatisfied with the lower-resolution Flash copy of the video you are watching? Try downloading the video instead—in a choice of formats too…. In addition to mp4 downloads for your video iPod, and downloads for your PSP, Google has introduced their own video player, and along with it, a video format they tag with a .gvi extension. I haven’t done too much research on the format, but I think that the gvi extension is simply a divx avi file, renamed to download and play back with Google’s video player. The GSpot Codec Information Appliance identifies the files as being divx4 with mp3 audio. If this is true, then the files should also be playable in my Philips DVD player with a simple file extension change….

Other cool new features…. The first videos I uploaded were only available on Google’s video site. This meant that the only way of really sharing the video was to do something like put a screencap on my site and link to the video on Google’s server. Now, however, Google has added an option to embed your videos—hosted from their servers— into your web-pages. This is a super cool feature since the viewer doesn’t have to leave your website to view the video. It’s seamlessly integrated into your page, only it’s not taking up any space on your server or using up any of your bandwidth. Can you ask for anything more?

So far, the only real drawback I’ve found using this new Google service is the terrible delay in the posting of videos that are uploaded. So far, it looks like the turnaround time is about three days, and there is no real way to tell when exactly your video will go live…. Just a small drawback in an otherwise amazing new tool for webmasters….