YouTube + Creative Commons

Starting today YouTube is introducing the option to upload your videos with a Creative Commons license. This will allow other users to legally sample your work to create their own mashups and musings. This is great news! Check out more details at boingboing.net

What the heck is Fring?

Well, I'm glad you asked. Fring is an app for iPhone and Android that allows you to make phone calls, video calls, and text message. Um ok? I already have Skype, right? What's the deal? There is a new feature with Fring that supports group video chats! So now you and three friends can all video chat at the same time. Check out this Youtube promo video (sorry the song is a little annoying).

Mash "UP!"

This is a "Pre-Make" of the Pixar movie "UP!" created by Ivan Guerrero. He has a series of videos on Youtube where he recreates modern movies, as if they were shot in the 40's, 50's, and 60's. You can visit his Youtube channel to check out his versions of The Empire Strikes Back, Ghostbusters, and The Avengers.



Our WIC MashUp Contest is right around the corner if you'd like to create your own little masterpiece. Check out the MashUp page for more info.

Alan Moore Loves Libraries

Alan Moore (author of Watchmen, From Hell, and V For Vendetta) visited the St. James Library in Northampton, England on Save Our Libraries Day. Here is what he had to share about libraries influencing him.

Via Boingboing

Youtube - Jump to Time Code

I just discovered this and thought I'd share, although maybe it's old news. Apparently you can include a timecode in the URL for a YouTube video, and when someone clicks on the link, they will jump to that specific point in the video.

For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymKLymvwD2U#t=01m38s

Will jump to 1 minute 38 seconds into the video. Click on it and see.

YouTube to Increase Upload Length to 15 minutes

BoingBoing is reporting that YouTube plans to increase their upload limit from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. Considering how many people we've helped here in the lab who have come up against that 10 minute and been forced to make some tough choices (ie. which parts to cut out of the 12 minute video they worked so long and hard on), this is great news. That doesn't mean you should just start extending your videos by 5 minutes, but it's nice to have the extra time when you really need it.

The iPhone 4 Antenna Song

As we wait to hear what Apple's big announcement is today about the iPhone 4 antenna, here's a song to keep you occupied.

YouTube embedding options

I don't embed a lot of videos, except for here in the lab blog, so when I embedded that wedding video a few days ago, I noticed all the options available. Check them out:


You can specify video size, whether it plays in HD, the color of the player, and more. Pretty nifty.

New 2GB filesize limit in YouTube

You may have noticed over the last month that YouTube upped their filesize limit from 1GB to 2GB. Unfortunately, they did not also increase the 10 minute video length limit, but at least this is good news for people uploading high-def video. More info at http://tinyurl.com/kvebav

This is not your Father's YouTube.

Everyone's familiar with the "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos, where Matt Harding travels around the world dancing his funny little jig and gets viewers that number in the millions for some reason.

Well Matt's latest video is available on YouTube in Hi Def. Yes, Hi Def. It's about time, am I right? HD is no longer for Vimeo users only. See Matt's latest installment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY and be sure to click on the "Watch in HD" link below the lower right-hand corner of the video. Who knew YouTube could look this good?

Embedding Video

So you want to put a video on your website...

YouTube
Well, the easiest way is to upload it to YouTube and then embed it that video onto your website. The benefits of this are:

1) It's free!

2) You aren't paying for any of the bandwidth. So even if a million people visit your website and watch your video, YouTube is paying for the bandwidth instead of you.

3) YouTube gives you the HTML code you need to paste into your webpage, so you don't even have to know how to write HTML to embed your video successfully.

4)You're likely to get more viewers because other people will stumble across your video on YouTube, whereas if you just store the video on your own web server, you have to do all the advertising yourself to make sure people find it.

The problem with services like YouTube is that you don't get much control over the quality or compression of your video. You're also bound by their artificial time and size limits (for example, YouTube limits you to 10-minute videos. If you have a longer one, you need to break it into 10-minute chunks).

If you're using iMovie 08, there's a built-in upload-to-YouTube option. Otherwise, YouTube offers advice on its website at http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/

Vimeo
Vimeo ( http://www.vimeo.com ) is still fairly new, and not as familiar, but it offers some distinct advantages over YouTube. Along with the benefits listed above, Vimeo has:

1) Better quality video (including support for HD video!) Check out one person's Vimeo/YouTube comparison at http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2008/04/02/vimeo-vs-youtube-quality/

2) No specific length limitation (although there is still a 500MB per week upload limit)

3) A for-fee service with even more features (see http://www.vimeo.com/plus )

Vimeo offers advice on how best to compress your video for upload at http://www.vimeo.com/help/compression and has a short video on how to upload at http://www.vimeo.com/339189

DIY
For maximum control over your video, you'll want to store the video on your own web server. If you're a student group, you probably already have a web space you can use. Otherwise, you can usually purchase a domain name, storage space, and bandwidth quite cheaply from a web hosting service (just Google it or ask for a recommendation from a computer-saavy friend.) The following advice applies only to people who have access to a web server and the ability to edit or upload webpages to it. If you aren't sure whether you have this access, check with the local service provider (LSP) for your home school, department, or organization.

We recommend using the FLV (Flash Video) file format (which is what YouTube uses) for your video, which gives a good balance between file size and video quality, and ensures it'll be playable on almost everybody's computer, since just about everyone has Flash installed on their machine.

In the lab, you can do this from within iMovie or Quicktime Pro. Open existing video file in Quicktime Pro or open your iMovie project on one of the machines in the lab and export as FLV it at Medium Quality using the "Expert Settings" option, since it will give you a smaller file size, which is friendlier to your viewers, who won't have to wait as long to watch your video and won't have to worry about having a fast enough connection to the internet.

(Note: If you're doing this on your own Mac, you may need to install the free Perian plugin ( http://perian.org ) which enables QuickTime Pro support for FLV along with some additional audio/video file formats.)

Watch the video to make sure it's a high enough quality. If not, export it again, this time with "high" quality.

Next, you'll need a FLV player for your website. Fortunately, there's an excellent player created by Jeroen Wijering, who generously makes it available free of charge for non-commercial use. You can download from his site at http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player You can then upload the player along with your FLV video to your own website.

Jeroen has also provided a setup wizard ( http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?page=wizard ) which gives you the HTML code you'll need to paste into your webpage. And he has a list at http://code.jeroenwijering.com/trac/wiki/FlashVars which explains all of the variables you can set to customize the viewer to your needs.

If you need help at any step along the way, just stop into the lab and ask for help!

Adding YouTube videos to your iMovie project

[UPDATE, FEB 2010: THESE INSTRUCTIONS APPLY TO iMOVIE HD/06. FOR INSTRUCTIONS ON USING YOUTUBE CLIPS IN iMOVIE 09, see http://wic.library.upenn.edu/multimedia/tutorials/youtube_imovie09.pdf]


We've received many many questions about adding clips from YouTube to iMovie projects. And until now, we haven't been able to do that in the lab. But today we've started to add that functionality to the lab workstations thanks to a free, open-source plugin for QuickTime Pro called Perian. Basically, the steps are:

1. Download the YouTube FLV file to your workstation using a service like keepvid.com
2. Export the FLV file to a QuickTime file with QuickTime Pro and Perian
3. Import the resulting QuickTime file into iMovie.

Keep in mind that YouTube video is notoriously low quality, but when you don't have a source of high-quality video, this method will do in a pinch.

Right now, Perian is installed only on the lab consultant's machine, so if you need to use a YouTube clip in your iMovie project, just ask the lab consultant on duty for help. We'll be installing Perian on the remaining lab workstation in the coming days. We'll also post a step-by-step tutorial so you'll be able to do it all without the help of a lab consultant.