Tag Archive for 'internet video'

Subtitling on YouTube — Now Deaf People Can Giggle At My Videos Too

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 2:07 AM on March 10, 2010 in Filmmakery. View Comments Tags: , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/vJ

YouTube still doesn’t have nearly the audiovisual quality and presentation of Vimeo, but I gotta hand it to them for providing some fairly awesome features.

I know they’ve had closed-captioning and subtitling features for a while, but I never bothered to try it out until now. I suppose if I don’t do the subtitling now, it’ll soon be done for me by Google’s speech recognition robots, and done very badly.

So here’s “Let’s Meet the Lerners” with full closed-captioning. Click the arrow in the control-bar-thingy, then the “CC” button to turn it on. And if anyone reading this is fluent in another language and wants to translate it, download this .srt file, open it in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X (if you’re savvy enough to use Linux, I probably don’t need to tell you what your text editor is called), and rewrite all of the texty things while leaving the numbers intact. Then send it to me, of course.

In Which The Geeky Political Drama Regarding HTML5 Video is Explained By a Kindergarten Crayon Drawing

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 3:44 AM on February 6, 2010 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/EN

Okay, you see, there are some major advances to watching videos on the web that everyone would be able to experience right now, except all of the browser makers are fighting over what type of video standard to use. It may be confusing to you, so I drew you a picture to explain it in the distinctive art style of Zacqary Adam Green at age five:

You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.

Finally, YouTube Will Let You Download Videos Without A Stupid Grabber Tool

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 4:53 AM on January 19, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/UeZ

I love how Google decides to publicly test new features without issuing a press release. I guess they figured that the blogosphere notices anyway so why bother with the fanfare? But here’s something rather nice: they’re using Already President as far as I’m concerned Barack Obama’s channel to test out their new ability to download YouTube videos from the site.

But Zacqary! There have been lots of tools that let you download YouTube videos for years!

That’s a valid point, Helvetica Bold 10.5 Dark Orchid, but all of those have required you not only to download an extra program or Firefox extension, but they grab the crappy, compressed Flash Video version that you’d see anyway on YouTube. Now, not only do you click a little link below the video, but you also get to download it in H.264 format! That’s the same encoding that they use on Blu-Ray. BLU-RAY! (Though, granted, the YouTube download has a lower resolution and bitrate than a Blu-Ray, but seriously, it’s an improvement)

I grabbed one of the Obama videos to compare, and yes, it’s quite nice:

H.264 is better than standard YouTube FLV

H.264 is better than standard YouTube FLV

If you view that full size, you can see that the downloaded video has better contrast and is a lot less fuzzy. Keep in mind, though, that it downloads at 480×270; I resized it to 640×360 so it would be the same size as the video on YouTube. But the YouTube video is probably scaled up too.

Sadly, it isn’t the same quality as YouTube HD:

The download is still lower res than it could be.

The download is still lower res than HD, unfortunately.

Again, I scaled the download up. At this level of scaling you start to see where the downloaded copy loses detail. Though the contrast still looks better…maybe that’s Firefox’s fault?

Now, this is still only available for Obama’s channel, but in the coming weeks, Google claims that everyone will have the option to enable their videos to be downloaded. Personally, for the sake of the common Internet user, I’m hoping that it’s an opt-out system. That way the only reason someone would have to stop being lazy and edit their videos is if they want to be an asshole or a corporation.

Speaking of which, when do I get to replace my old videos with HD versions? They’re all ready to upload as soon as you let me, Google.

[Source: Ars Technica]

Confuzmodo: How NOT To Write An Article Including Videos

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 3:03 PM on January 15, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/rwm

Gizmodo says Fake Steve Jobs Rips CNBC a new one??!?! Wow, what an interesting sounding article. Let’s see what it’s about.

Unfortunately, all mention of Dan Lyons, who played Steve Jobs on the Interwebs, disappears completely after the first paragraph of the article. And it’s only alluded to there at all after an “UPDATE”.

The entire text of the article talks about how Jim Goldman is a bad reporter and didn’t tell everyone about something or other regarding Steve Jobs and how he’s maybe dying which you should all STFU about anyway because dying SUCKS so leave him alone whether he is or not. But Fake Steve? No, you have to watch the embedded videos to know what the hell they’re talking about in that aspect.

Now, it’s not too unreasonable to ask someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post. It’s rather unreasonable to require someone to watch a video to understand what you’re talking about in a post and NOT ASK THAT IT HAPPEN.

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Warner Music Mutes YouTube, So Blame Them Instead

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 1:47 AM on January 15, 2009 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/53v

I’ve always had my qualms with YouTube about video quality, comment moderation, ease of use, comment moderation, and comment moderation, but what’s got the blogosphere exploding lately is something that I kind of pity rather than hate YouTube for: videos containing copyrighted music are having their audio muted.

This actually isn’t new, just a new option for users hit by an increasingly rabid crackdown by Google’s Video Identification robots. A video that I posted of footage I took at Anthrocon was taken down automatically just because I happened to synchronize the footage with a song that is copyrighted by a gigantic corporation. I was given the option to replace the audio with a different song, which would have killed all my hard work in Final Cut, or I could dispute the claim, either because it was an incorrect match (which it wasn’t) or because it was Fair Use (which it was).

Dispute Submitted to WMG
I don’t love YouTube’s handling of Fair Use, though legally the burden is upon the Fair User to justify it, so I suppose taking your video down before allowing you to defend the use is appropriate. That’s how I handled my video, explaining to YouTube’s input box that my video was non-commercial and did not prevent the copyright holder from making a profit. Submitting that dispute got my video replaced quite punctually, but when I clicked that Submit button, I saw a single line that told the story of who the true villain is here: “Your claim has been submitted to WMG.” Warner Music Group.

Continue reading ‘Warner Music Mutes YouTube, So Blame Them Instead’