B. Mann Consulting

Wouldn't it be great if you could get the original video files back out of YouTube? Wouldn't it be great if you could just upload videos to YouTube and have them automatically appear in iTunes, correctly transcoded as needed?

Yes, I was as surprised as you when I went poking around the YouTube developer section and found no methods to get back the original video files or to do any of these other things I wish for.

I still like Revver's "bolt ads to your videos" business model, and AudioBlog is still my choice for the most flexible commercial service to easily input/host/etc. all your audio and video service (including direct-to-iTunes support).

But where are people putting videos in order to get an audience? YouTube, of course. Let the chorus of "YouTube sucks" begins...until someone else manages to make something that is as popular.

So, after completing the previous post about storing video and other large files, I did go off and buy my AudioBlog.com membership for a year (you can try a 7 day free trial as well).

Over on my personal site, I posted my first moblog: I called into the AudioBlog phone number with my cell phone, recorded, and hit publish. I had previously set AudioBlog up with all my blog details (I have 4 set up so far -- this site, my personal site, Bryght, and Urban Vancouver), and you punch a code into your phone identifying the blog to which you want to publish. You can also just record and handle the publishing details later on through the website.

Everything went pretty easy, minus a few things I had to fiddle with in Drupal to get things working seamlessly. The two things you need to know here are 1) choose MovableType as your blog type...the Drupal one falls back to using the Blogger API, which doesn't even support titles, never mind categories; and 2) AudioBlog uses an iframe to display the Flash audio player, which won't display unless you have Full HTML and/or iframes not filtered by default.

It seems that since the launch of Ourmedia, there are now dozens of places wanting to keep your videos online. You know, trying to be the "Flickr of Video" (aside: could Flickr itself start storing video? I think there are a lot of differences between static photos and video, but I'd love for that team to take a run at it...). Actually, the issue is bigger than just video -- in general, there is a lack of easy ways of both storing and downloading large user created files online. BitTorrent (plug: go get BitTorrent for Dummies, written by my friends Kris Krug and Susie Gardner) helps with download and bandwidth savings, but uploading and storage haven't really been solved. 10MB seems to be the magic number -- anything larger than that is difficult to deal with using a regular web upload, meaning you need to use an uploader application of some kind.

In any case, this is was just meant to be a test post pointing to some personal videos. I completed my test of Revver, which uses a special uploader. I was wondering why my videos weren't showing up, and it turns out there is an extra step of actually bringing them public. This should probably be worked into the uploader at some point, but for now it makes the uploading process very simple.

My public video page for Revver has all the clips I've uploaded (only two so far), both taken on my Canon S1 IS. Here's the thumbnail and click-through link for the heron video: