I’m increasingly frustrated by the crappy compression YouTube uses – that’s what makes everything so fuzzy when you upload something. Since YouTube is so popular it seems unlikely to be unseated as The Place To Stick Your Videos any time soon, but it’s neat to see who’s out there trying to innovate.
Today I found Viddler.com, which offers free hosting along with the ability to embed videos on other websites (which YouTube does as well), but in addition, you can tag your videos, with different tags appearing at the appropriate part within the video. You can also reference specific sections of a clip, which is a really nice feature. It’s got an intuitive, if somewhat busy, playback interface.
I like the fact that Viddler shows me how far along it is in the encoding process so I know when I’ll be able to see the finished product after uploading it. YouTube just says to check back soon.
Here’s a screencast I did a couple of weeks ago on how to create IM accounts and then tie them all together in Meebo. I did this in Camtasia Studio and it’s supposed to have a menu on the left to allow you to jump to the relevant sections; that only works with the Studio-generated Flash file though. Like most of the sites, Viddler won’t let you upload a Flash file, so that menu is lost. Except since I have the ability to tag sections, and reference specific sections of the video, it’s not really lost, just transformed. Click on the tagged spots in the timeline to jump to that section.
Here’s a link to the part of the screencast that shows a Captcha.
The embedded video above is still scaled down, which is why it doesn’t look very nice. You can hit the Play icon that appears in the upper right corner to "View video in full screen mode" to see it at the original resolution.
You can comment and tag other people’s videos too. Still exploring the features of the site, but it looks pretty nifty.
Technorati Tags: Meebo, Viddler, Tagging, Screencasts
Comments
6 Responses to “Viddler – video hosting and quite a bit more…”
Also, do not forget that you can resize the player to fit whatever size video you’d like. So instead of downscaling the video so much, edit the HTML embed values to be larger!
Thanks for giving Viddler a try, glad you like it!
Oh, and you can upload an FLV, is that what you want to do?
Thanks Colin, I went ahead and resized the embedded video a little bit and it does improve the local readability – thanks for the easy tip. Hmm, I’ll have to check to see if the Camtasia output to FLV retains the menu – that might indeed solve the menu “problem”. BTW, I keep looking for the playback control in the lower left instead of the lower right. I’m sure you’ve done usability studies, but in case not, maybe you could switch the playback and tagging/comment controls? 🙂
The full screen feature is enabled now: just use the “embed” button, and the code to copy will have something like [param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”]. I discoverd viddler today and I’m also very nicely impressed.
Paul: I believe you only edited some of the embed values for width and height, resulting in the menu button being weird. Be sure to update both.
Also the allowFullScreen parameter seems to be missing? Was that taken out? I would suggest copy/pasting a new embed code from the site, editing all 4 width/height values in the embed code, and trying that.
Sorry you had some issues!
Thanks Colin, I think I’ve got it all tidied up again.