I’m convinced the collaborative sharing of digital media in and between classrooms is an enormously powerful teaching tool. I am also convinced that utilizing technology like YouTube is a positive way to encourage this practice. However, I recently had a discussion that revolved around the conerns of posting YouTube videos embedded within our school website. I want to empower teachers to use a youtube-like tool to post videos and embed the videos within their web pages, but the concern revolves around the link that the youtube video provides back to itself - thereby providing students with a link between our school website and some possibly inappropriate videos back on the youtube site. Sooooo…I needed to find a solution that would either remove that link or an alternate video sharing site that didn’t link out (because I really don’t want to manage the videos on our site).
SIDEBAR - In my search for the appropriate solution to this dillema, I stumbled upon this site from methodshop.com that provides a great tutorial on converting youtube videos to ipod format. I tested it and it works. At the very least it helped me better understand how youtube video works. However, I still need to find a free converter tool that will modify the .flv file to an .mp4 for the ipod. The tool they suggest within the tutorial only handles the fist 90 seconds of video unless you pay for it. I might just go ahead and pay for it because having the ability to download youtube video to your ipod is simply awesome. Also, I suspect one of the Adobe products I currently have will do the same thing. However, this process will allow you to grab some usable video from youtube nonetheless.
Back to the issue at hand….finding a youtube alternative.
I’ll start by taking a look at some other popluar video sharing sites that have a webpge embedding functionality.
First impressions: A very quick loading and clean, friendly interface. Creating an account was unbelievably quick and easy. Uploading a video extremely simple and the process intuitive. Video upload procedure is drag and drop. Good quality. Gives the ability to upload to Blogger, Typepad and eBay as well as email, HTML and permalink. The HTML option gives you both javascript and html code.
Here’s an example with the javascript code…
Here’s the HTML code…
Well, apparently I can’t embed the javascript here, but no matter - the html code came out fine. As you can see, there is still a link off-site. However, it takes you to the videoegg front page and no videos are immediately available. I suspect that you actually have to sign up for an account. this might work out well. Easy to sign up, easy to upload and easy to embed without the immediate link to potentially inappropriate videos. FYI - the video I am using here is from video I stripped off of youtube, and converted from .flv to .mp4 to download to my video ipod - so the quality issue is due to those conversion steps.
First impressions: Again, extremely quick to sign-up. The initial pages have a bit more of the social context (showing videos from other posters). The video upload procedure simply involves browsing to the file and describing it. Provides tagging function built in - helpful for organizing. There is a weekly limit of 30 megs. This video took up 3.25 megs so the space limit might possibly present some issues. Like most of the rest, it converts the video to flash. Here’s a look at the embedded content…
First video test on Vimeo
If the user doesn’t copy the last litte section of code, the links back to the vimeo site won’t appear. Like so..
I don’t see any way for the user, therefore, to link back into Vimeo easily. HOWEVER, you’ll notice that when the video is paused/stopped the links appear as slide-outs in the video panel (try it, play and then pause the video). Clicking on that, takes you back into the Vimeo site and immediate access to other videos. Potentially the same problem as Youtube. On the other hand, the “Get code for this clip” feature is pretty slick.
I picked up on this one when I read in a blog that they tend to be a bit more “Family-friendly” becasue they pre-check each video rather than posting immediately and then pulling video down after
Drawing lots of cudos from many people. This one does have a very rich assortment of videos available for viewing. Some of the content here is great - for example, there is a series of user submitted videos that show daily life on the street in Baghdad - personal stories and accounts from real Iraqis. I found that intereting and stuff like that is fantastic for application in the classroom. The account creation process is very simple and it gives you a custom homepage (http://craig.blip.tv for mine). The uploading process was easy, including a media description in which you can use some basic formatting tools (text featuers, html, lists, links, etc). It also promtps you to define your license value on each media object you upload. You can cetegorize by keywords or place into a genre and assign a rating. Can also associate the media with an event. These are all options available on media upload. Also, you can include advertising if you want. Finally, you can set up crossposting to your blog, myspace, flickr, and del.icio.us or syndicate to Yahoo! Video, AOL Video and MSN Video or add to the iTunes Podcast Directory. There’s even a pingback to Technorati function. Very slick overall and a robust set of
I played with Eyespot maybe a year or two ago. Its still in beta, but it works great for what it is and the premise is great. Here, you can upload video clips and then use some easy and intuitive tools to mix/remix video and audio into custom clips.
Account creation is straightforward. You can upload files up to 100MB. One great feature is they provide a mechanism to send video from your cell phone via mms. They also have a ‘one click publishing’ mechanism built in to post video to Blogger, LiveJournal, Veoh and blip.tv. They also allow you to easily download in various formats including ipod, psp and divx. They give you permalink and html embed code. Here’s a quick vid of my office that I uploaded from my phone…
Now I had some trouble uploading the test video. I was getting a ‘document contains no data’ error when I tried uploading it. However, I was able to email it to my account using the same address as the cell phone upload. Here’s the embed of the test video…
I think this might be a good choice even though it isn’t as polished a product as some of the other options. I can’t find any way to link back into public content from these embedded videos. In addition, it has some really nifty tools like the editing functions and the MMS interface. I would like to see the ability of the player to be resized to full screen by the viewer.
Similar in concept to Eyespot, but getting rave reviews that indicate a higher level of editing power. One neat thing with this is it allows the viewers of your video to immediately jump into the edit mode and mess around with your video. Also has support for multiple file upload. This site seems to run a little slowly, but it may be my browser misbehaving.
As you can see, there is a very interesting feature that allows the viewer to go ahead and “remix” the content - they are sent directly to the video editing page and they can manipulate the individual clips/audio/transitions/effects/etc. Very applicable to some classroom acitivities. However, we have the same problem with the included link to jumpcut which sends the viewer to the video page on jumpcut and from there they can click ‘explore’ and quickly be exposed to potentially inapprorpiate content. Bummer. But not a reason to avoid this altogether I would say.
This one has a revenue sharing thing so it places an ad at the end of your video. Doesn’t appear to link back to the video sharing site but it does link to the advertiser’s site. This one indicates that a live person reviews every video upload to validate that it does not contain porn, hate speech or copyrighted material. Account creation is very quick and the page loads seem pretty snappy. I submitted a video and got a message immediately in my ‘dashboard’ that it was submitted for review by their ‘Video Patrol Team’. So while I waited, I checked out the site and noticed a couple things. First, the videos are a little slow to download and don’t appropriately buffer before playing - so unless you pause and let the buffer fill up a little the videos are a little choppy. Second, there are quite a few vieos that can be found that I would describe as ‘marginally inappropriate’ .
The embedding features include script for flash using JS, Quicktime (for MySpace), flash via HTML, QT using JS, and even a thumbnail link. Here’s the Flash embed:
