Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

My online video experience until very recently was limited to watching clips directly on YouTube and Google Video, and downloading episodes of Diggnation once in a while.  There are of course more places and worthy video podcasts on the Web, but I just didn’t have the right tool, and I didn’t bother enough.  But all of that had changed.  A few days ago I stumbled upon Miro.

So, what’s Miro?  Miro is a cross-platform (works on Linux, Mac, and Windows) application for downloading and watching online videos.  It has a really simple and straightforward interface and does a lot of magic by itself.  You just search for things that you are interested in – either by keyword or by category – review the list of results, subscribe to shows that you like and Miro automatically downloads them to your computer.  You can watch those shows any time later.  Even when you are not connected to the Internet (such as on the airplane for example).

You can search through downloads, sort them in a number of ways, etc.  After you have seen the video, you can either delete it or keep it.  If you do nothing about it, Miro will keep it on your computer for a few days (defaults to 5), and then will delete it to save some space.

Miro also comes with a built-in video player, so you don’t need any external ones installed.  On Linux, Miro supports two back-ends – gstreamer and xine.  I had a problem with gstreamer not playing any audio, so I switched to xine and everything is working nicely now.  As an extra bonus, Miro’s video player remembers your last position for every video you played.  So if you just stop the playback and decide to continue later, you won’t have to fast forward – Miro will just automatically start playing from the point where you stopped.

Miro supports a number of sites for video downloads.  With YouTube, for example, it downloads a high definition (HD) version of the video by default, if its available.  Also, torrent sites are supported and Miro handles them automatically as well.

Miro is such a simple and useful tool that it changes the way you see online videos.  For example, before Miro I could only handle just a few podcasts, but now I am subscribed to dozens.  It’s like an RSS aggregator for online video.  It’ll make you want watch more videos.  And it will make it extremely easy to do.

Obviously, I can go on and on about how wonderful it is, but instead of listening to me, you should get Miro and give it a try.  Let me know in the comments if you liked it at all.

I’ve been using Skype for a few years now, but mainly for chats.  Occasionally, I’d do a call, but that never involved video.  Until recently.  A couple of days ago my dad got online (finally!).  And now there is a good reason to use Skype with a web camera for video calls.

One of the key points in Fedora 12 release notes was about improved support of video cameras.  That I was glad to hear.  I got my hands onto several web cameras and all of them seemed to work just fine in Cheese – a video capture application.  However, none of these cameras worked in Skype.  Either they were not recognized by Skype, or Skype was crashing, or I was getting really weird green-screen output, or something else.

It turned out, that there is something I had to do.  First, check if libv4l package is installed, and if it isn’t – “yum install libv4l“.  That’s a video for Linux library.  Second, start Skype like this: “LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype“.  Once I did that, Skype / Options / Video Devices confirmed that video is working fine.

Scobleizer believes in longer videos:

Advertisers also will pay a lot higher rates for those long-form ads.

Why?

Because someone who’ll watch a 30-minute video is HIGHLY ENGAGED. They are far more likely to become a customer than someone who just watches a two-minute entertaining video.

I think that “video” is too broad for this topic.  To consider only educational and entertainment videos, I see a huge difference.  I don’t believe that entertainment videos will become longer.   Entertainment is a sort of thing that doesn’t have to go either deep or long.  Thus it doesn’t need large chunks of time.  Educational video is a totally other story.  While there are many “howto” type of videos, many topics require more than 5 minutes to explain.  Take Google Tech Talks for example.  They are pretty popular and each one takes about an hour.

There is also this factor of production costs.  It’s much harder to create 60 minutes of high quality (and I don’t mean pixels or bytes) video material, than 10 minutes.  Or 5.  Filmmakers know that.  And the audience knows that.   While less and less filmmakers will risk it, and more and more of those who do risk it will produce crapy long videos, the audience will learn the benefit of a short video and will be more inclined into choosing shorter formats.

However, since I am not at all involved in any video production or distrubtion, I might be totally wrong on this.  Judging purely from my own experience.  And my own experience mostly comes from YouTube and Google Video.

How well are you familiar with YouTube celebrities – Numa Numa, the Star Wars kid, leave Britney alone, Coke and Mentos, etc?  If you missed any, of if you want to refresh your memory, here are they all on one page.  The first clip is a music video “Pork and Beans” by Weezer band.  After that, each and every one of them in a separate, original video.  Loads of fun!

Flickr has recently added support for videos.  Many thought (and some still do) that it was an April Fool’s joke, because the information broke out on the 1st of April, but it seems that it was no joke after all.

When I heard about it, I was a bit surprised, and had a slight negative feeling about it.  Flickr seemed to do just fine as they were.  The photo site community is very different from the video site community. And don’t we already have YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, and a tonne of other video sites?  Why Flickr should be spoiled by videos?

But after I spent some time reading about and checking the implementation, I have to say that I like it.  There is a FAQ about this new feature which does a good job explaining the idea behind it.  There are many ways to define what a video is and how it should be handled.  Flickr went for a very nice definition – “a long photo“.  They have imposed a 90 second time limit on all videos, as well as allowed uploads to Pro accounts only for now.  That’s about as right as it could have been done.

Indeed there is a need for short video support on Flickr.  I do have a YouTube account, but it’s not what I need right now.  I am not doing a lot of videos, and the ones I do usually complement the photos nicely.  Most of my videos are very short and rather personal.  For these needs, YouTube is a bit too much with its noisy community, channels, and subscribers.  But Flickr videos seems to be spot on! I suspect there going to be a few changes and adjustments to the current functionality in the near future, but even as it is now, it’s pretty handy.

Have you tried Flickr videos?  What do you think?

Via Exler’s blog I came across these two videos. First is the really amazing walking robot. This is the best I’ve seen so far (although I am not a big robot fan or anything). This robot walks better than many humans that I know. Even better than I can do myself. A must see.

Secondly comes the hilarious parody for the above video. If you saw the first video and haven’t laughed at the second one – there is something really strange with your sense of humor. It must be broken I guess.

Check them out!

First of all, a confession.  I was aware of the fact that there is such a show (or video podcast) – Diggnation.  I was aware of the fact that it is somehow related to the Digg web site.  And I think I even remember watching a couple of episodes a long time ago.  But, all of that was in my passive memory.  I wouldn’t remember what the show was about, if it was funny at all, or even who or how many of the hosts there were. So, when I was checking the agenda for The Next Web Conference 2008, I couldn’t have imagined what the “DIGGnation, live recorded from Amsterdam!” entry at the end of day 1 was all about.

The situation started to change when I noticed that at the end of the day there was a stream of new people in the conference hall, and that many of them were wearing Diggnation t-shirts.  That kind of looked suspicious – are they all coming specifically for the show while avoiding the conference as a whole?  It turned out it was indeed so (I later spoke to a few people who came from all over Europe just for Diggnation).

The Diggnation live in Amsterdam episode is up and you can see yourself how it was.  There was also a live stream during the recording, and the whole thing was somewhat longer with preparations and closing of the show, but it will give you an idea of how it went.  There were indeed a few rounds of free beers for the audience, and there was indeed this awesome dude with two joints for the hosts.

I enjoyed the show so much that I actually watched a few episodes back and will probably watch the new ones now and then.  If have a very sensitive sense of humor, you should probably skip.  All the rest – you’ll have a blast.

I’m not usually very political.  I don’t care much about elections, campaigns, politics or policies, and things like that.  But that didn’t stop me from watching the USA presidency candidate talks at Google.  Here are the names and what I think  of them:

• Ron Paul.  This was the only video that I watched in full length.  This guy speaks good, and he has plenty of common sense in him.  He’s also pretty popular on the Web, but, somehow, I doubt that he will make it to the president.  He and his campaign contradict the interests of too many people.
• Hillary Clinton.  She speaks like a politician with a lot of experience.  That’s probably why I don’t understand much of her.  Watched the video for about 10 minutes.
• Barack Obama.  I don’t have much interest in hearing how he reads “I think” and “I believe” of the paper.  He looked very much like someone who haven’t written those notes…
• John Edwards.  This is the case of one picture being a thousand words. It’s much easier and faster to say “I don’t believe that guy” after taking half a second look at him, than listening to an hour of him talking.

I’ve mentioned this many times before and, I guess, I’ll need to mention this ever more – the technological progress of the recent years (the digital world, yes) has left many systems of our society behind.  Educational and legal are the most noticeable.   Here are a few words in the insightful and funny video (originally from the Ted.com – a place of many more insightful videos).  Here is a quote from a recent Boing Boing post showing the state of the legal system:

… pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission.

TechCrunch has an excellent cover of the “photograph in the video” story that has been going on all over the web in the last few days.  Basically, somebody wrote a funny song and made a video for it.  In that video a bunch of images were used including one that was downloaded from Flickr without permission of the photographer.  The photographer got really pissed off and such.  The video was re-edited to remove the offending image, but there was plenty of discussion on how is right and who is wrong in this story.  Some really important questions on copyright, fair use, and free speech were asked, and some really smart people tried to answer them.

The rights of the copyright holder have always been balanced against the more fundamental right of free speech. And free speech in the Internet age, more so than ever before, goes way beyond words and text. The way people express themselves on the Web increasingly involves images, video, animations, and other rich media, often in mash-ups of pre-existing works. That is how people communicate today. Both copyright law and industry standards need to evolve to take that into consideration.

While I support the (copy)right of the author to command the usage of his or her work, I think that this particular case wasn’t handled properly by the photographer.