Video Week Day Two – Google Video
I thought long and hard about including Google Video in this week’s entries since they now own YouTube, but they offer some features that YouTube doesn’t, so I think it’s worth talking about.
Google’s video offering is different from other online video sites as Google doesn’t put a cap on the length or size of the videos you upload. I’ve used them to upload programs ranging from a few minutes to an hour and a half. They encourage users to upload as high quality a size as you can – I regularly export full-size videos from iMovie or Final Cut and send them to Google – I’m talking about 1 and 2GB files.
To upload, you use a Google Uploader program, which you log into with your Google account, choose your file and sit back and wait. Once the video uploads, and the bigger the file the longer it takes, you can log into Google’s Video website and add in information and tags about your video.
Here’s a view of the Uploader:
Something that I think is really interesting about Google Video is the ability users have to also upload captioning to their videos. I haven’t done this, but it’s a nice feature to have.
So, how does it look? Here’s a video I uploaded this week from an event we had on campus back in February. It’s an hour long, and was produced by a professional video crew. I ripped a DVD copy of the show using Handbrake to a full-size mp4, H.264 video at 5000kps. The quality is decent – you can see some artifacting and other compression jaggies.
Embedding is easy – you can grab code from the view page of any video and use it on your site.
One difference between this and YouTube is that on the video page for any video at YouTube, you can see stats – number of plays, links, etc. With Google Video, you’ve got to be logged in and then you can see just page views for each video. I am not sure if those stats include embed plays. Here’s a quick grab of some stats from yesterday. We don’t use Google Video a ton, as you can see.
In the end, Google is the best place to host your longer video pieces. Let them handle the storage and bandwidth.
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