YouTube Videos
I discovered that Windows will import videos from my camcorder as in .wmv format as well as .avi. This makes a big difference because one hour of mini-DV tape takes up about 2Gb in wmv format but about 14Gb in avi format (which is just too big), you’d need a Blu-ray disc to store it). Consequently, I’ve been choosing the wmv option every time I download from the camcorder to my computer via the Firewire cable.
I had taken a series of short clips when leaving Samosir island and decided to collect them into a composite video for posting on YouTube. I used Windows Movie Maker, added some text at the beginning, end and in between clips and compressed the five minute file to a little under 15Mb. This option provided a resolution of 384 x 288 with 13 frames per second which seemed adequate for YouTube. I’ve been maintaining an aspect ratio of 4:3 and avoiding the 16:9 option on the camcorder because our TV is still 4:3 as is YouTube.
After uploading and viewing the result, I was quite disappointed with the quality and wondered what had gone wrong. A little investigation led me to this site that offered a very simple solution to the problem. It was to simply add &fmt=18 to the YouTube video’s URL and it worked. The difference was dramatic. This little trick forces the video to be displayed at a higher resolution with an option to view it at the standard resolution appearing below the video.
I then visited this site which contains the above trick and many others. I’m working through the information on the site and it’s apparent that there’s a lot to consider but for the time being I’m very happy with my new little trick and the revised URL (with the &fmt=18 added) is what you send to friends and it is what you use when embedding your video in a blog.
Here’s the lower quality video and here’s the higher quality video. Can you spot the difference?
On a final note, I must remark that I’ve been unable to access Edublogs for about 24 hours. I had no problem with any other site, only this one, and if it happens again I’ll be leaving Edublogs for good. There’s plenty of other free blog hosting sites out there that provide reliable access.
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I’ve been uploading many videos to YouTube, and the best way to do it is to really, just pre-encode it to FLV first yourself with a program like SUPER. This makes it FASTER to upload and process. As the file’s smaller and it’s FLV, which means that YouTube doesn’t have to encode it again. So the processing part there is faster. Although YouTube doesn’t say this on their site, FLV is definitely the best way to upload videos to YouTube. The quality is very high, too! Here’s my YouTube channel. http://jp.youtube.com/user/kevinayP
And if you’re still thinking of leaving edublogs, please check out WordPress. It’s by far the best blogging platform ever. If you have a server yourself, I’d recommend WordPress.org. If you just want a free service, go to WordPress.com. WordPress.org is better, though, as it supports Plugins and Add-ons, and more themes.
Here’s my blog, powered by WordPress.org. http://blog.kevinay.com/
Again I forgot to approve this comment. Thanks for this advice. I’ll certainly check out SUPER. If it’s free software, I’ll use it to upload videos to YouTube.