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YouTube -- The Flickr of Video?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Aug 14, 2005 08:30 AM
from the baby-stepping-towards-something-cool dept.
from the baby-stepping-towards-something-cool dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A new folksonomy website that seems to be catching on is YouTube, a service similar to Flickr, except that it is for sharing and hosting short video clips instead of photos. Like Flickr, its core functionality is implemented in Flash. Videos can be tagged, searched, discussed, etc through a social network. YouTube has developer APIs, RSS feeds, and the ability to embed videos directly into other web pages. The website was recently profiled on TechCrunch as an up-and-coming Web 2.0 application."
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Pretty cool, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
(http://fark.com/)
Would osmeone please be kind enough to explain... (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone that can offer real insight, and not the usual Slashdot-know-it-all-speak, would be greatly appreciated.
Re:Would osmeone please be kind enough to explain. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Would someone please be kind enough to explain. (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.owonder.com/)
Thank god... (Score:3, Funny)
Flickr requires Flash? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://deadbox.ath.cx/)
Of course, you can also use it to do other neat things, like mass-tagging images. But it is definitely not the "core functionality" - uploading, tagging, adding descriptions, browsing, adding tags and comments, etc, photos all do not require Flash.
Have a nice day! =)
I Shall Wait (Score:1)
(http://www.primary0.com/)
Why in Flash? (Score:2, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday February 21 2004, @08:07PM)
At one point and time, I had the following on my computer:
I needed all of those just so I could play video, since every website had its own different format. And my system was crawling at a slow when it loaded. When I looked at the system tray, it was filled with 15+ icons.
So I got rid of them all. I got tired of keeping track of what program was calling home. I got tired of Flash loading into websites when I did not want the Flash (like ESPN). I think the final straw was the slashdot story saying how Flash was not secure, that programs could exploit it. I figure the less programs running on a computer, the more secure that computer is.
Why can't everyone use one standard like MPEG? What is wrong with MPEG? It is perfect, anyone can play it, it does not require anything extra. The video quality of MPEG is better than any WMV or quicktime I have seen. And it does not require any downloads or special programs to play.
Folksonomy? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.frostopolis.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 09 2005, @02:35PM)
"Folksonomy" apparently refers to keyword-based organization and tagging and such.
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.
From the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org].
Peeked Under the Hood (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Saturday February 25 2006, @11:02PM)
The operative bit of code is this:
file = "get_video.php?video_id=" + _root.video_id;
So take whatever video_id you're looking at and paste it ontod =
http://v3.youtube.com/get_video.php?video_i
instead of anything useful, I got a buttload of raw crap dumped in my browser window.
Hopefully some other /.er can tell me what format its in.
P.S. The site ran fine in FireFox
donning a new habit? (Score:2)
(http://www.moviepig.com/)
I watched two of its offerings: the zucchini-eating baby (which YouTube proffered), and the article's "all-time favorite", Matt Dances [youtube.com]. The latter did have a certain something, no doubt about it... but neither induced me to eMail my friends about it, nor to expand my weekly routine for more...
Not the first.... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.slashdot.org/~lukewarmfusion/journal/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 02 2005, @02:49PM)
Vidiac.com [vidiac.com]
PutFile.com [putfile.com]
In my experience, the quality of the videos posted are often quite poor. The owners of the sites battle copyright issues constantly and risk being held responsible if their users post material illegally. Finally, the range of the audience affects the overall quality of the site. Videos that a 12-year-old finds funny may not be worth my time.
Not all the criticisms apply to this particular site or to all uses of the site, but it's there.
Video of Air France Flight 358 crash on YouTube (Score:1, Informative)
or without ads.... (Score:2, Informative)
Down with vowels (Score:1)
www.vobbo.com (Score:1)
(http://www.pixelranger.com/)
Flickr doesn't use flash (Score:2, Interesting)
Video isn't Image (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 08 2005, @04:33PM)
Watch the Terms of Use for copyright ! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/terms.php [youtube.com]
Under section 4, it says:
Do you think this is fair ?
Video vs. Photos (Score:2)
(http://galacticnorth.blogspot.com/)
The first thing wrong with video is that it has a default and sometimes fixed playback speed. Some players have fast forward and so forth but it is usually clunky to use, and some compression formats make scanning the video difficult. The result is most videos are very boring. With a bunch of pictures, it's very easy to move forward and backward at whatever speed I want, since most viewers understand that's what the user wants to do (although some shitty sites out there force a slideshow playback).
It's much lower quality than a picture from a similarly priced device. I'd rather look at a high res series of photographs capturing a few frames of something in motion rather than a smooth but thumbnail-sized video of equivalent size.
It presumes too much of what the viewer wants to see. A large photograph allows my eyes to scan to parts of interest at my leisure, a video typically reflects exactly what the person recording was interested in, flicking from thing to thing or over concentrated on something uninteresting to me personally.
It requires much more skill to capture well. You have to hold the camera steady through out the entire video, not just for a fraction of a second to take a still picture. A poor photographer who shoots a lot of pictures will probably end up with a few that could pass off as nearly professional, but a crappily taken video stays crappy no matter what.
Unless you set up a camera on a tripod, video taping something really removes you from the event because it requires constant attention on the tiny lcd screen rather than experiencing everything normally. To everyone else you don't even have a face, you're just a video camera. Taking a picture is a discrete event, inbetween you put the camera in your pocket or bag and are just experiencing everything normally again.
It is more annoying to have your video taken than have your picture taken. There's something more respectable about someone taking pictures than taking video. Video will capture little annoying things about you that you dislike, the way you said something or some mannerism, but a picture is just a tiny slice.
It's difficult and very time consuming to edit. And of course any editing is presumptuous of what the viewer would like to get out of the video. Editing with pictures is natural- just don't upload the pictures that turned out bad (and like I mentioned before, it's easy to skip over uninteresting pictures quickly).
The file sizes are huge, unless quality and length is compromised. This makes video hard to share and distribute, over the internet or even in person. Everyone you know will probably hate you if you force them to sit through 30 minutes of vacation video, but if you let them flip through a book of pictures they're going to like it much more. Someone on the internet may invest very little time to look at some of my pictures [flickr.com], but it's doubtful anyone is going to download a video for ten minutes without a good reason (like the promise of female nudity, say, or the recommendation of a trustworthy blog).
Perhaps many of these problems will be addressed eventually, sites like youtube may lead to some solutions (the flash playback seems awful- how do I save the video and send it to someone, burn it on a dvd, edit it into my own remix of various found videos?).
Can All Of Us Really Become Vloggers? (Score:1)
A typical clip runs about 2-3 minutes and the
But it begs the question: who's paying for all that server bandwidth? She solicits no donations, and seems to have survived the exposure wired.com gave her. Can sites like these truly be done inexpensively? If so, how?
For the record, I have no affiliation with her, have never met her, but enthusiastically applaud her efforts. If it is indeed easy to acquire the resources, bandwidth and video production tools necessary to create quality vlog content my guess is we're probably seeing the beginning of a true internet paradigm shift. My gut tells me however, that's a big 'if.'
I'll leave the question of whether we should or not for another day.
*cough* *cough* yea, we do that too. (Score:1)
(http://www.vidiac.com/)
I'll answer what questions I can that I've seen posted here.
1.) Does advertising pay the bills? Yes, but it's very low margin unlike picture hosting and the like. There are many ways to make a living on this, from syndicating the best content to providing pay-per view for high end content. Our goal though will be to be able and pay back the content creators for their submissions "leveling the playing field" and allowing indie artist to make a living creating quality content.
2.) Why Flash player? We're using Windows Media and are preparing to launch a Flash option. We're finding that the 20% of the population Windows Media doesn't reach is covered by Flash. There are no elegant solutions out there. I've seen some good Javaplayers like on2, but the problem becomes that sites like MySpace and Xanga limit their user's ability to post Java making embedding videos difficult. Our solution will be to offer both and let users pick what works for them. Real and Quicktime have their own pros and cons as well, but right now the most ubiquitous player is Flash7. With 15,000 videos submitted to our system since February though it's expensive to diversify into more than two formats (transcode time and storage)
Right now we stand on an interesting convergence of cheap video editing software, inexpensive video recorders, cheap hard drive space and bandwidth that is starting to become affordable. I think you will see many new Video hosting portals cropping up in the comming year. Our Software is an "ASP-hosted" software solution that lets you create your own portal for your web site, and not to brag on ourselves too much, it's been a huge success. We're now streaming 370K videos a day to 50K people across 30 sites using our solution.
Like any new communication format, it will go through it's trials and tribulations in the coming year, and I'm sure we'll see a lot of garbage, but I think we'll also see a lot of good come out of it. My Favorite example of that is Anthony Carlone who is Video-Blogging xBox games. He's very young, and right now his reviews are rough, but who's to say that he won't turn into his own "G4-television" channel in the future?
http://xboxcountry.freevideoblog.com/ [freevideoblog.com]
Anyhow I'm just happy that I'm playing some part of this, and every day I find it neat to see how our software is being used.
Adam Bruce
Vidiac.com
Re:And some of you would pay for this? (Score:2)
(http://www.slashdot.org/~lukewarmfusion/journal/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 02 2005, @02:49PM)
That's how you pay for public television, CNN.com news articles, and Slashdot.
Re:Porn (Score:1)
(http://slashdot.org/)
so how long until its flooded with porn do we think? one, maybe two weeks?
ok, see you there next week...
Re:And some of you would pay for this? (Score:2)
(http://fight-a-dui.com/)
Can you turn on the TV and view a video message recorded for you by a girlfriend/boyfriend/mistress/etc thousands of miles away?
Can you record yourself telling a joke and send it to your friends and family across the country?
There are great uses for video blog [vobbo.com] services.