video

Linux, Skype, and web camera

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.

Skype video

Longer video? Maybe.

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.

Pork and Beans – YouTube celebrities all together

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 videos

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.

Screenshot of Flickr upload page

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?

Walking robot fun

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!