Monthly Archives: October 2009

Reviews

Who gets my vote for online video?

I wanted to upload a 25 min/525 MB video to a video sharing site recently. I found myself out of options. Ever since Google Video stopped allowing new uploads, there is no other site where you could upload a video this long, at that file size, without having to upgrade to some sort of paid account. Still, there’s one site that gets my vote for being a whole lot friendlier to its users.

First, let’s look at what’s available.

YouTube

They’re the giant with the huge market share. We already know we’re up against the 10-minute limit there, which can only be lifted if you’re some sort of government or news organization.

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The nice part about YouTube is that they’ll allow video clips to be up to 2 GB in size, but I do wish there’d be a way to lift that 10-minute limit, at least for some of the videos we upload, say, something like 1 video per month can be up to 30 minutes in length, or something like that. There’s no Pro option at YouTube, although it’d be nice if there was a low-cost one that would have longer time limits for uploads.

Vimeo

Vimeo is up next. It’s a much smaller site than YouTube, but it’s geared more toward video pros and amateurs, people who tend to do more with their videos than just turn on a webcam and hit record. If you have a free account there, you’re up against a 500 MB weekly limit, which is generous, but in my case, it turned out to not be enough.

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The Pro option at Vimeo is $60/year, and it ups the weekly quota to 5 GB (from 500 MB), with unlimited HD uploading. It’s pretty cool, but since I don’t work with a lot of video, it’s not the option for me.

SmugMug

SmugMug has NO free video uploads, but they offer that option to those with paid accounts (Power and Pro users). I have a Pro account with them, which lets me sell digital downloads and prints of my photos very easily. I appreciate that a lot. The Pro account also lets me upload SD and HD video, but the really annoying part, the part that gets me steamed up, is that I’m limited to 10 minutes in length and 600 MB in file size per video clip.

I’m sorry, but that’s even lower than YouTube standards! Why am I paying $130/year when the video uploads are so hamstrung? I don’t care so much that the codecs used for compressing the uploaded videos are better than those at YouTube; I happen to care when I can’t upload a video and have paid for a Pro account…

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SmugMug should seriously reconsider upping their limits to 30 minutes per video and at least 1 GB per file. They’re behind the times.

Facebook

I got a really pleasant surprise when I checked into Facebook’s video upload requirements.

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They have a 20 minute limit and 1 GB file size limit per video clip. In my opinion, that’s better than what YouTube, Vimeo and SmugMug provide. The best part is that they’re free. As far as I’m concerned, they get my vote for the best online video offering. It may not be the highest-quality compression, and it may not be the biggest free offering, but I think they’ve struck a great compromise between video clip duration and size.

I should mention that WordPress also has a video upload option, which I reviewed recently, but have not included here because it’s tied into their blogging platform. They have no standalone video upload and share option.

There you have it. If you want to share larger videos online, use Facebook.

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Thoughts

Are camera guns a lost art?

A little while back, photos of a camera gun made the rounds on all the cool blogs, and people everywhere thought they were new and exciting. How easily we forget… Camera guns — analog cameras and film cameras mounted to gun barrels or provided with pistol grips — were more common in the 60s and 70s than we might think today.

I watched an episode of Columbo last night, entitled “The Greenhouse Jungle”, released 10/15/72 (almost 37 years ago) and in it, Columbo’s assistant pulled out a camera gun that looked even better than the stuff making the rounds these days.

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As he explained in the episode, the device was a “camera-mounted starlight scope”, used “quite a bit at Berkeley for night work”. camera-gun-columbo-episode-2

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Since I can find no modern camera guns, I’m tempted to call them a lost art, perhaps yet another victim of a PC society where everyone’s afraid of everything.

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I think the inspiration for camera guns came from the portable video cameras equipped with a pistol grip, sold around the same time period. They looked like this.

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These last two images came from a site called Atomic Rocket, where they have a whole page dedicated to futuristic sidearms.

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Lists

Condensed Knowledge – October 11, 2009

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions. I only share a certain number of articles in each of these posts, so if you’d like to see more, visit my full Google Shared Items list.

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Thoughts

Now in top 75K websites on the internet

I took a look at my Quantcast stats today, and got a nice surprise. After hovering around the 100K rank for some time, I’m now ranked in the top 75K websites on the web. I do hope the trend continues along the same route, to the point where I can announce that I’m in the top 50K websites and so forth.

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Why do I reveal this information? Because I believe in transparency, and I’ve been fairly open about my site’s performance from the get-go. (See this post from 2006, or this post from 2007 for a couple of examples.) I started using Quantcast to track the ranking of my site in 2008, and ever since then, I posted a little button in my sidebar that you can always click on to see my live stats.

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By the way, let me take this opportunity to invite serious, legitimate companies who want to gain exposure to a worldwide audience to get in touch with me. The details are here.

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Thoughts

Turning trash into usable products

Ann Wizer from XSProject Foundation (as in “excess”) is making custom-designed bags and other products from non-recyclable plastic waste found in Indonesia and the Philippines. She buys the raw materials from trash pickers, whom she pays at above-market rates, and, using trained artisans, creates beautiful products from trash that would be clogging landfills, streets and waterways in those countries.

Through its work, the Foundation is protecting the environment, reducing poverty, and teaching locals how to sustain themselves through the work of their own hands. The end results are beautiful, as you can from the photos and the embedded video below. The cause is noble, the work is noble, the means are innovative, sustainable and ennobling, and so I think Ms. Wizer and her XSProject Foundation deserve our applause for the wonderful work they’re doing.

Embedded video from CNN
Turning trash into usable products (CNN)

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* I would have linked to their online catalog of products, but at the time of writing this, it seems to be down.

Images used courtesy of XSProject Foundation.

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