And this is what YouTube is developing as a new ‘beta’ version:
they got rid of the large banner (” Use Quicklists!”) which was basically a waste of space.
all clip info is now under the video instead of to the right. All info on and action on a video are now in one place. I like it.
Youtube likes you to check out other videos. Most newly freed space is dedicated to thumbnails of other (‘related’/'promoted’) clips: you now see 13 of them on the frist page instead of 5.
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I’ve had a number of requests from attendees of the Barcamp Brussels 3 event. “The speeches were recorded on Nokia N95 phones, right? How come we haven’t seen them yet on Youtube/Google? What’s taking so long?” Well, here’s the answer.
The reason is purely me. I received the N95 video’s (3DVDs, about 12GB in total) from Fré quite soon after the event. At the time, I was ‘just going to throw them’ on Google Video, maybe with a title image before the movie that included a Barcamp and Nokia logo. How hard would that be, right? Well, slightly harder than I thought. The files were huge, so had to be transcoded to something smaller, there were too many files to do things manually, so I needed to start scripting, and the tools I used for it, ImageMagick and FFMPEG are powerful but tricky. That combined with my tango activities, a holiday, a girlfriend abroad and the non-negligeable fact of having a day-time job made for this delay of over a month. Mea culpa. But the wait is over.
These are the first videos. Feedback on video, sound and other details are welcome! I will then proceed with the conversion of the other ones. I will also do a post on what tricks I used to do the video rendering of the title, the transcoding and the merging of video files.
Let’s compare some of the main video hosting services. Now that YouTube has been sold to Google, maybe one of these is on the shopping list of Microsoft or Yahoo!
The source: mobile video
The source file I used was recorded with my Nokia N91 phone at a concert of Billie King in the Ancienne Belgique (Brussels), at the end of their set. The cute girl you see hitting the cymbals is Isolde Lasoen, Belgium’s finest female drummer. The equally cute lead singer is Tine Reymer.
The input file is:
video format: MPEG-4 (compressed), 352 x 288 pixels, 15 fps
filesize: 7.817.226 bytes
duration: 0:01:54 (114 seconds) – so around 550 kbps bitrate
This means that (a) the source material was already compressed and comes from a consumer-grade, low-quality camera, so it was no DVD quality to start with and (b) the source dimensions (352 wide) are smaller than most embedded players(400-480 wide) so the movie had to be upsized, which adds some more distortion.
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