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Watching videos on the web
REALITY-BASED shows like the American Idol have proved that we love watching the highs and lows of wannabe superstars. That’s the main reason behind the growing popularity of online videos worldwide.
In this regard, nothing is more popular than YouTube, the community-based social networking website. The 15th most popular site in the world, YouTube allows its users to upload, view and share video clips.
Over 100 million videos are watched each day on YouTube. This includes all sorts of categories from clips of popular films and television programmes to music and home-made videos. The popularity of YouTube can be gauged from the fact that anyone on it can have his or her 15 minutes of fame.
You can make a video with your webcam about anything at all, ranging from talking about common and mundane issues, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_YMigZmUuk (over one million people have watched this clip) to a comedy skit involving Coke and Mentos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkkOUPYNs7I.
To use this amazing web application (since it is less of a site and more of a tool), you’ll have to visit www.youtube.com and register free of charge with the website. After this you can browse through the videos or upload one yourself through the “upload link”.
The best part about YouTube is that it has made uploading things easy. This is now a simple two-step process. Choose your video file and set the privacy settings — public if you want everyone in the world to know what you have to say, private if you only want a selected group to watch it.
Generally, uploading will take one to five minutes for every 1MB with a high-speed internet connection. You will see a “Video upload successful” page when it’s done.
You don’t have to be trained in all kinds of software to make a video. You can create your video in any way or format you like. You can even make one using your webcam.
Upload it and YouTube will automatically convert it into the Flash format, making it accessible to anyone who wants to watch it. However, please note that videos are limited to 100MB in file size for all users and are 10 minutes long.
YouTube also allows viewers to provide feedback through comments, to send messages to users, to add a video to “Favourites” so that you may watch it again, and to “Subscribe” to a user’s feeds whose videos you really like. The social implication of this is that you can reply to someone’s videos with a video of your own, meet new friends or just stay in touch with existing ones.
Another advantage is that the video feeds of YouTube can be easily embedded in blogs and websites. So, you don’t have to send video clips of your pet dog, for instance, to your friends in America. Simply send them the link or copy the URL (available on every video page) to your blog/website and voila! They will easily be able to see that video as soon as they visit the page.
Now, what happens if you want to save those videos you have watched? It is a constant hassle to go back again and again to watch the video that you liked. Plus, the internet speed is slow here in Pakistan so it does make more sense to download the video first and then watch it. To do this, you can visit http://keepvid.com/ and paste the URL of the video, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79zYK7-ztvU in the textbox. Wait a while and the download link will appear. Click “Save As” in your browser and save the file to your computer.
Please do remember that since these are Flash files, they won’t work on an ordinary media player. To view these files, you will require an FLV Player and you can get a free one from http://applian.com/flvplayer/ or www.flvplayer.com. Just drop the file you downloaded into the player and that’s it. Viewing media can’t get any easier.
For advanced users, do check out http://www.vsocial.com/ as well. This web application gives you all that YouTube offers and more, with web-based tools that enable users to actually “do something” with video. For instance, if you embed a clip on your blog, you will see a meta-layer that enables you to see how this clip was tagged by members, see what comments were made about it by them, and email the clip to friends with a click, all without going to another site.
The writer works for an IT company
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