The uber geeks

Using Google Video Part Two: Viewing your video

On the heels of “Using Google Video Part One: Uploading your video” I’m happy to announce that my video has been approved to be seen by the public on Google Video.

The approval process

The approval process took almost two full days, and even after the status changed from “under review” to “live” - the video did not appear for a few hours. When I asked Chris Fehnel to see if he could find the video, he could, but I could not. This leads me to believe that, like Flickr, Google takes your video submission and spans it over many servers to help with the load. As this process is taking place, your video is intermittently available. After a few hours, I was able to access the video directly as well as search Google Video for it.

Finding your video

You can locate your newly approved video by doing a search for its title or any other information you provided Google when uploading. For instance, you can search for “The Works Bomb“, “Colin Devroe“, “Chris Fehnel“, “Drano“, and many other searches to find our video.

Doing a search through Google’s main search site does not return results from Google Video. I’m not sure why not, perhaps because the Google Video service is still considered BETA. I’d like to see a way to force the index to attribute specific Web site pages (or blog posts) with videos found on the Google Video service so that they can appear next to each other on search results.

Viewing your video

When you load the page for your video it simply starts playing. Since the service uses the Flash plugin to display the video, almost anyone with a Browser can view your content. The main video page shows a large video pane, the “chapters” that Google has created for you, as well as all your meta data. There are also ways from this page to view the Author’s Web site and find more videos relevant to the one you’re currently viewing.

The Google Video service automatically sets up “chapters”, or points that you can automatically fast forward to, that are chosen on the right hand side. Something I thought was neat about this feature is that if you have not yet preloaded the video file to the point of the chapter you click on, the pre-loading starts at that point, not the begining. For instance, if you are viewing a rather long video, you’re able to skip to later chapters without the need for a long buffering wait.

Another “little thing” that I found while using Google Video is that the video will automatically pause when you switch tabs in Safari. I have not tried this in other tab based browsers, but I really think this is genius.

You might think that the quality of videos found on Google Video are horrible (and so did I at first), to the contrary they retain roughly the same quality of the file you’ve uploaded, just that there is some type of compression going on within the Flash file. If you’d like to view a video at its intended quality, click on the arrow in the bottom right hand side of the Google Video viewer and choose Original Size when viewing.

For our video, I noticed that the Google service added a grey line to the bottom of the video. This could be caused by any number of things, and I am no video expert, but I’m guessing it had something to do with the compression options I chose when authoring the video originally. Perhaps an expert in the field could let me know why this happens.

While viewing the main video page, you might notice something about the top search field. It gives two options, search all videos or this video. Google Video, while uploading, allows you to enter in a transcript for your video. Using that feature will allow people to search for specific sections within your video. I’ve tried this with other videos that provide a transcript, which we don’t yet, and it works really well. I can see this as being an extremely useful feature for much larger files, especially those that deal with tutorials or some type of specific spoken content.

Short wish list

Of course I have my demands as any geek would. I’d love to see Google add the ability to download the original video source file. Maybe this could be the author’s preference when uploading the video, or perhaps only the author themselves could download the video source file again. This would be a great way to back up some videos that you might not want sitting on your hard drive.

Again, I’d love to see Google Video integrated into the main Google search results. This would provide quick and easy searching for any content relative to a given topic, but I’m sure this isn’t that far out.

Embedding your Google Video into your site would be really nice. This would help alleviate the stress on the authors server and eliminate the need to link away from the main site. Perhaps the embedded video could have some Google Adsense ads underneath it to help subsidize the cost of the extra bandwidth, although I’m sure Google has that to spare.

Conclusion

Google Video is a great service that is being put to great use by many people. It allows you to make your video, regardless of its size and length, available to anyone on the Planet in a quick and easy way that it simple to learn and use. I’m sure that as time passes more and more features will be appearing within this service, and that its use will grow rapidly for things other than faking lighting your farts.

Read: Using Google Video Part One: Uploading your video.

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