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Google Video Becomes Search-Only, YouTube Holds Content
Bangor writes "Google is planning to turn Google Video into a search index of all the world's available video online. The
change will see YouTube becoming Google's only platform for user-generated video and premium content sales, and Google said that YouTube content would be immediately added to the
Google Video search index. The company plans to expand that to eventually include all video online. From the article: 'The company said that they 'envision most user-generated and
premium video content being hosted on YouTube,' which clearly suggests that the Google Video storefront will eventually give way to YouTube.'"
Here's a link to the official announcement from Google's blog.
Google's interface was better. The videos could easily take up nearly full screen, the quality seemed a little bit higher, and it was just overall easier to deal with compared to YouTube.
I mean it makes sense considering a lot of videos appear on both, and they own both, so why not cut costs by just linking to the one on youtube. That way they can free up more storage as they keep adding to gmail.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
I was wondering how the acquisition of YouTube would affect their Google Video service, which was always far behind its competition. However, this also means that some YouTube content will now be sold, which detracts from one of the allures it has always had, which was that all content was free and accessible.
I wonder if Google has plans to Google-fy the YouTube look (they'll likely hold onto the brand name, but the look and feel are very changeable)?
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Can someone please translate this all into non-marketdroid-speak?
3PO?! Get over here! Translate this. Then hit me in the head with a lead pipe so I can understand it.
1. This will save everyone from having to upload their boobie and accident videos twice - go look at the top 100 some time, that's all it is.
2. People that create the content (videos) still won't get paid, much like Google News, etc.
3. Google will replace their search in a year to one big button "I'm feeling lucky"... which will show a boobie video.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I'm wondering if OSS is going to be left behind completely when it comes to video. I'm interested in doing some free educational videos, for instance, but I don't want to mess around with proprietary software, because OSS is what floats my boat. If I'm understanding the current technological system correctly, you-tube became popular because they packaged video in a convenient way, as flash applications. However, flash uses proprietary codecs for both audio (MP3) and video. It is possible to develop for flash using a 100% pure OSS setup, but AFAICT there are some pretty severe limitations, including lack of source-code compatibility for GUI widget libraries, and lack of OSS support for proprietary codecs. It doesn't seem like ogg theora is really ready for prime time yet, and in any case there's no sign that Adobe will ever support free codecs for audio and video. Yes, you can use ffmpeg, but the fact that it's illegal in most jurisdictions for many uses is surely going to put a damper on it in the OSS community.
One interesting recent development with audio is that it's become practical to get audio out to users using a completely OSS chain of software. In this WP article, for instance, there are links to recorded snippets (claimed as free use) which take you to a pure-java ogg player that runs as an applet in your browser. The preformance is actually surprisingly decent, possibly because of JIT. Since the last remaining bits of Sun's Java implementation will go GPL in March, we'll really have a pretty good framework for distributing audio via 100% OSS. OTOH, I don't see any signs that anyone is going to take theora seriously any time in the near future.
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It is not search only, you will still be able to upload videos to Google Video. The article just says that Google Video will have different features than YouTube... i.e. YouTube will focus more around the community aspects of video.
After much being made of Google slipping from doing a few things very well to doing many things up to par, they seem to be focusing again on their existing network. No surprise that it their major investment that is receiving much of the focus.
I for one, am happy to see Google working to improve existing modules instead of rolling out a new beta module from Google Labs every few months.
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Too bad. Google Video's interface is far better than YouTube's. The dealbreaker that keeps me loyal to Google Video (not that there's anything worth watching on either) is the ability to skip forward in the video to a part that hasn't yet been cached. I sometimes like to skip through a video to see whether it's worth my while to watch and it makes me nuts having to wait for the whole thing to download first.
So much for being able to freely host video without that annoying You Tube logo/bug in the corner of your original content.
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Why would "some YouTube content" being sold make it less alluring? I'm genuinely curious. What (theoretically) prevents you from using it for all the things you use it for now? There's no inherent reason the paid content couldn't just be an addition to the free stuff without detracting from it. Sure they might screw it up but it's all hypothetical at this point anyway. YouTube can't exist indefinitely without some way to pay the bills. Google's so far got a decent track record for integrating paid & non-paid content in non-irritating ways.
I really liked Google vids clean layout, and served perfectly for putting up my (private/nonsearchable) testing videos for a game I am working on.
A shame I have to resort to the cluttered YouTube interface, I hope they at least keep the 'private' option available.
Don't get me wrong: I love YouTube when I want to randomly browse videos one after the other, getting appropriate links from the suggested videos: I just don't think it serves me well in publishing such a video (without resorting to implementing it in my site) with a clean interface.
Google Video is not going away! All they're doing is adding YouTube results to the search results when you search Google Video. Their plan is to at some point incorporate other video websites so that Google Video is not just a place to view videos, but also the one place to search for videos.
- at-google-video-and-youtube.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/look-ahead
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YouTube *purposely* compresses video into a low quality FLV/flash video format before you ever see it. Don't lose all hope - YouTube might get better.
In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if the videos from YouTube made available from the Google Search are higher quality - in fact, maybe even the original . After all, SOMETHING needs to attract visitors to the Google page!
You're mixing up several issues here.
.flv file and use FOSS tools to transcode it to any format you want, including simply changing the container losslessly. Since these tools are already available, it would not be out of reach to envision a simple FOSS Firefox plugin that did this on the fly for YouTube and other similar sites.
Firstly, posting a video on YouTube does not require any flash development at all. So the availability of FOSS flash development tools for POSTING is a non-starter.
Secondly, YouTube supports a plethora of codecs, some of which are already FOSS. For example, I know they support XVid for a fact. Now, I know this is an MPEG4 based codec and is therefore patent-encumbered in some parts of the world, but IMO this has nothing to do with if it is FOSS or not. YouTube may already support FOSS codecs like Theora, Dirac and Tarkin, I don't know I have never tried. But frankly, it would not surprise me if they did, especially since they already support obscure formats like "Sega Video".
The only FOSS-related issue, as far as YouTube goes, is the fact that you (supposedly) need a binary flash PLAYER to VIEW the content. I say "supposedly" because in actual fact, anyone can download the
I agree there are funny/informative/etc videos. They're just the vast minority and wading through the shite is not "fun". Rather play the piano, bitch about things on /. or go for a drive instead of sit at the puter waiting for videos to download ...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Export option for highest quality posting to Google video and YouTube
They better do the switching after Youtube's quality is equivalent to GV. Also download feature is important for me too.
I prefer youtube to be a part of Google Video not the opposite.
1 - With Google Video I can download the videos in avi format and with a higher resolution.
2 - Google Video license conditions are much better than youtube.
3 - Google Video's interface is better
The nice thing about google video was that it worked and it was simple. You could resize the video arbitrarily. Unfortunately simplicity and functionality doesn't make money.
I liked the Google video feature of downloading videos. Hopefully they will incorporate this in their integration of the two.
For some reason on Linux, with 32bit Firefox and flash, the video/audio desyncs when watching videos on YouTube. So I normally try to find the video in question on Google so I can download and watch it with mplayer. Why YouTube didn't offer a download option, I'll probably never know, but Google seems to know exactly what users want and gives it to them; I can only hope they will continue with that for this project.
On another note, it made more sense for the videos to take up most of the screen. Rather than YouTube's backwards approach of a video taking up 15% of the page, ads taking up 10%, and flamebait/troll comments from 12 year old kids. I only want to see the video (and maybe some ads so they can generate some money for the bandwidth its costing them), that's all we need.
And here I was going to start uploading video's I created to google . . .
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Nothing more logical, if you think about how Google Video compete with You Tube and the power that the You Tube brand has. I don't see how Google would maintain both services running simultaneously as they are today.
Er Galvão Abbott - IT Consultant and Developer
GV allowed 640x480 with no size/length restrictions and no fee.
YT maxes out at 320x240, with a 100MB/10min limit on free accounts.
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
What about stereo vs. mono? And I don't mean the "stereo" (fake two channel mono) of YouTube videos to date.
There are a lot of other videos that I do this with as well. If I find an interesting video linked here, at Fark, etc. that I don't have the time to watch, again I just download it for my iPod and watch it later. This is for me the best part of Google Video.
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since google is the biggest web index in the world
... keep downloading data when the player is paused
wouldn't SEARCHTERM ext:(avi | wmv | asf | mov | ogg | ogm | mp4 ) already
give you the most video results on this big blue rock in the sky
while searching for things like that is kinda unusual for many users
google video could be a front-end for just that
anyway i like this initiative, because it do think it won't be the easy front-end i just subscribed
and i endorse it since youtube does a better job at providing web based video than video.google imo
their flash player just kicks video.google's player 'mivonks': i never seem to be able to seek in video.google and it doesn't seem to
the former is a necessary feature since recently my cpu cooler is seems to be dying so i have to pause regularly to lower the temps from time to time
and the fact that it keeps downloading enables people with slow or irregular downloads to enjoy a movie as well.
this could simply be the best of both worlds and that would be awesome
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Are you? I'd always read you as being 40ish from your posts.
A sort of grumpy, gruff, bearded, cynical UNIX admin, who doesn't like this young upstart Linux.
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If you use the videodownloader extension to firefox you can download the flash videos. They can be played with VLC. You can use downThemAll! to do the downloads, so they can be managed better than with firefox's crap-ass download window.
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It misses out on some important features. 1. Favourites. Why on earth did they not add this to Google Video? Of course people can book mark favourites on their browser, but not everybody carries Google Firefox Extension to synchronize bookmarks everywhere. And this could have given clearer picture about popularity of video contents too. 2. Hide Stuff, instead of view fullscreen. People do like to keep their desktops uncluttered. A button of keyboard shortcut or anything suitable to hide away the narrow right margin, instead of popping up a full screen would have been much more desirable. 3. Comments and labels were added very late. 4. No features to allow user to view history (Not even a frickin link to the GOogle Search history page), or organize use of Google Video content and features were provided. You tube has for instance, playlists (manipulatable, Gooogle Video only has automatic search playlist). 5. Search in Google Video was terrible. Most of the time I get totally unrelated video. Whereas, more often than not, viewing one item on YouTube, would almost in 80% of the cases, get you handy links to related content. You could be hooked on the site for almost entire browsing session. 6. Communities were better provided for in You Tube. Google Video does not have any community feel in Google Video. Although the minimalistic interface worked fine for Google Search Site, it does not work for Video content sites. The main reason is, one would spend about few minutes searching for stuff, but substantially much more viewing (or reading) content which they have searched. And that is something which needs more usable features.
Crud. I hope they retain Google's ability to play and encode closed captioning.
Free market forces closing off a method of free publication made simple, easy enough that fools can and do use it. It's something they have not found a way to make a reliable buck from, as the site would lose it's popularity if it went to pay-per-use. They want to commercialize the site and prohibit people from freely posting whatever they wish free of charge. It's also their right, though, as it's their site. How long did you expect them to continue to add storage to archive all that video and keep it always ready to access and use?
Yahoo Video already "searches all available video content" including Google video and Youtube and many others. http://video.yahoo.com/
Or you could Get Democracy - open source, downloads to your machine, supports YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and more...