Google Video
Google Video is a new service in beta from Google
that allows anyone to upload videos to Google's web servers, and allows
people to search and play videos from their
search engine. People have been able to upload videos to their web site
for a few weeks but only on June 27 did more information about their
services
become available.
From their About page:
Our mission is to organize the world's information,
and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every
day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised
content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news
shows.
Their aim will be to have all TV shows, and a large quantity
of video available, and fully searchable. They currently have 2 types of
entries: the ones uploaded from individual users are viewable for free, and
videos uploaded by a list of companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN, etc.) will be
viewable for a fee, details of which are still unclear.
Currently, users outside U.S.A cannot play videos of this service, when a
viewer tries to play a video and he's not in the supported countries he got
the following message:
Thanks for your interest in Google Video.
Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn't available in your
country.
We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we
really appreciate your patience.
Viewers
New method
The videos are shown using the Macromedia Flash Player,
which most users already have pre-installed, so typically, no extra plugins
are required to be installed. This method allows users to pause, rewind, and
seek within a video, features which were not present in the old method.
Another new feature is the ability to view 10-second clips of the video
while viewing the search results
Old method
You previously had to do the following to view videos:
To view the videos, users can download the Google Video Viewer, an
application based on VideoLAN 0.8.2 (according to their About page). The
program currently only runs on Microsoft Windows, and Google has released
the source code for it. Alternatively, for computers that do not have the
viewer installed, there is a Macromedia Flash viewer that plays the video
inside a user's web browser.
There is a free, user-created script called Embedded Player -> Link
Converter for the Greasemonkey extension for the Firefox browser that allows
users of any OS to stream Google Video through the application of their
choice. It can be found here. Note that you must have Greasemonkey installed
to run this script.
Uploader program
Similarly, users have to download the Google Video Uploader
in order to upload videos. This program is available on Microsoft Windows,
Mac OS X and Linux.
See also
External links
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