8 posts tagged “audio and video”

Flickr launches video hosting

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Update: Information about the frame rate has been updated, see more below.

Today Flickr is introducing the single biggest change to its service since launching in 2004--video. The photo service is rolling out the capability to upload video clips of up to 150MB to its paying Pro members. Free members will still be able to view these clips, but will be unable to add their own, at least for the time being.

The company has taken a very different direction than I originally imagined by limiting user video clips to just 90 seconds. It's a far cry from the arms race of higher quality and unlimited length offered by services like Vimeo, Viddler, and even YouTube to a certain degree.

That's not to say videos will look poor and grainy, though. The system has been designed to scale any clip you can throw at it, including high-definition from high-end point-and-shoot cameras or your HD-capable camcorder. The frame rate also maintains 30 FPS, which is half the speed of video captured on most modern point and shoot digital cameras, but a step up from the 12 FPS that was available while I was testing the service over the weekend.

Flickr videos can be played right in the stream of thumbnails. You can also jump to the full-quality version of it with one click.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What Flickr is trying to do with these small clips is provide a place for people to post and share the little videos they're capturing on their digital cameras. The throwaway items that are still very watchable, but hardly worth spending the time to upload to a separate service. The company knows this move will turn many off to the new service, but as part of the Yahoo ecosystem there are important boundaries that dare not be crossed. In light of Yahoo Photos shutting down last year to make way for Flickr, the company seems to have recognized the importance of brand separation and seems intent on creating these artificial boundaries if only to keep people from being confused.

The folks at Flickr say the time limits were not a move forced from having to share company resources with Yahoo Video. Kakul Srivastava, director of product management at Flickr says Yahoo Video is all about giving people a place to create their own content channels and drop those large videos. Her vision for Flickr video is simply to popularize the longer version of photos--something they hope becomes an artistic medium, and that people simply get used to taking alongside their still photography.

So how do videos fit in with the photos? Quite well, actually. Glancing at someone's photo stream (now classified as a media stream), photos and videos sit side by side with no differentiation besides a small play button in the bottom corner of video thumbnails. Like photos, you can simply click on them to go to the page that contains all the usual things like user comments, tags, and metadata, or you can simply view the video in its thumbnail size right in the stream--complete with player controls. It's absolutely wonderful, albeit tiny.

The player is a modified version of the one found on Yahoo video with controls that fade away after a few seconds to reveal the full shot. Users can embed clips on third-party sites as they would anywhere else, and developers can pull in them in through the same data API that's helped integrate Flickr into all manner of third-party tools and services. Expect to see Flickr videos making their way to photo mashup and editing services in a few weeks--JumpCut excluded (for now at least).

Getting your videos on there in the first place is almost as easy as viewing them. Videos can be uploaded at the same time and the same way you're used to uploading your still photos. The Web uploader takes them just fine, and so does an updated version of the desktop software for PCs and Macs. Once your videos are on the service, you can't get them back to your hard drive, something I'm told will be coming later on.

Video on Flickr is off to a good start, but with the artificial time limitations, I find it to be unsuitable for most of the clips I take. For those I'd be better off uploading to a standalone video service with more generous time and file size limits. I can only imagine some of my less tech-savvy friends trying to upload a video that's slightly over the size or time limit and simply giving up. That said, power users and people who are intentionally shooting short-form video will find the service a joy.

In the future I expect Flickr to lift the size and length restrictions entirely. In my chat with Srivastava, she had alluded to as much. The company also plans to let free users upload videos later on when the platform matures.

Various specs can be found after the break. See also News.com photo guru Stephen Shankland's post on it.

* Video uploading for Flickr pro members
* The ability for free and pro members to view public video clips
* Video limits up to 90 seconds long and 150MB maximum in size
* Controls to make videos private, visible to friends and/or family, or public
* Seamless integration of videos into the photostream, along with photos
* The ability to share video clips individually, as part of a set, or embed on third-party Web sites
* Tagging and geotagging capabilities for videos
* The ability to search videos by tags and descriptions
* The ability to upload videos directly from camera phones
* The option to view videos on a full screen
* Licensing options to mark a video as 'All Rights Reserved' or designate a license through Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/)
* Application programming interface (API) for third party developers to create programs or services using authorized video submitted to Flickr
* Eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and traditional Chinese
* Upload from the Web, from Uploadr, via email, via API
* 700 kbps
* 12 30 FPS, keyframe every 12 (fixed)
* Scaled within a 500x500 box (aspect maintained)
* Audio: 44.1 kHz, stereo, 64 kbps
* 2-pass VBR, 700 kbps

Update: One thing you might find kind of neat (I do) is the video embedding function. It's not just a standard bit of embed code; it's actually quite massive. The upside to that is that the built-in embedding tool is incredibly simple to use. You can change either the height or width and the embed code will change the other size value accordingly. There's no need to go in and change the hard code or pull out a calculator to figure out how to keep the aspect ratio.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

PingerCast: Easy voice marketing for mobile phones

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As if Twitters and Seesmics and Tumblrs weren't enough, there's a new short-form multimedia format you now can publish to: Pinger's PingerCast. The service lets you record short audio clips and sends SMS alerts to your subscribers' mobile phones every time you have a new file. The SMS message contains the phone number that your subscribers call to get your audio.

Designed originally as a marketing platform for media brands (movies, popular music artists), it's now available to everyone, and at least for the moment, it's free to use.

It's like a podcast in that the content is audio, but almost everything else is different. The format is length-constrained (five minutes max), and the delivery mechanism is independent of a computer or MP3 player: It goes straight to subscribers' phones. (Registered users can also get the content on their computers.) Sign up for the Webware PingerCast on the widget below -- but read to the end of this review first, for a privacy warning.

Setting up and recording a PingerCast is very easy. You can record from your PC, upload a file, or dial in to the Pinger service to record your updates.

Once a subscriber listens to a PingerCast message, they can reply by voice. These replies are sent to the administrator's online Pinger console, and can then be downloaded. But although PingerCast does allow audio replies to its messages, it's not a conversational medium like Seesmic. There's no easy way to set up a back-and-forth audio chat.

The service also gives its publishers useful reports on who's listening to what. The reports are a little too rich, I thought: They reveal the phone numbers of the subscribers.

I don't think any of the Web 2.0 bloggers I know will adopt this medium, since the alerting function, SMS, is rather intrusive compared to social update services like Twitter that you can jump into and out of on a whim; and since it's not conversational. But it's a creative service and I can see how brand marketers who are trying to reach a more mainstream audience than Web junkies would find it attractive.

Previous coverage: Pinger: When you want to talk at, not with.

Mixwit reimagines the Web mix tape (legally)

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Rafe and I enjoyed playing around with Muxtape yesterday (review), but were turned off by the uploader and potential limited life span of the service due to its lenient position on copyrights. If you're looking for a slightly more flashy experience, and one that works without having to upload 50MB of music from your hard drive, check out Mixwit. It lets you create gorgeous-looking Web mix tapes to share with others and pulls in media from various streaming services such as Seeqpod and SkreemR.

Maybe its greatest asset is that the players look like real compact cassette tapes, with moving spools to match how far you are through the mix and each song. You can tweak the look and feel of the tape, the font, and the playlist with a wonderfully simple Flex editor. If you feel like going back to make changes, you can also go in and add, reorder, or get rid of songs that don't make the cut.

The one bummer is that linking to playlists is not as simple as an affair as it is on Muxtape, which gives you your own personal URL. The upside is that you can create multiple mixes using a central account.

Mixwit tapes can be embedded in all the major social networks, along with any regular blog, which I've done below.

See also: Create viral mixtapes with Fuzz

Audiko does free ringtones for the iPhone

I remember a time when making ringtones used to be a very cumbersome experience. My technique of choice was to use the open-sourced Audacity then do various conversions in iTunes or Quicktime Pro by tweaking some of the advanced settings. However, the Web has spawned newer, less tedious methods. On of them, Audiko, is a particularly well-done effort, letting you grab audio tracks from your hard drive or the Web and customize them for use on your mobile phone.

While I think ringtones of popular songs are largely annoying and superfluous, the tools to create them are actually quite fun. Audiko simply layers the entire track on one timeline, while giving you a magnified area for each minute of the song to manipulate up to a 40-second ringtone from the segment of your choice. The entire editor is overlaid on a waveform of the song, and you can toggle whether or not you want a fade on the in and out, which can be helpful if your phone doesn't automatically do it for you.

When you're all finished creating your pocket masterpiece you've got three simple download options. One will save it as a normal mp3 ringtone compatible on most major handsets, as well as an option to download the .m4r iPhone-compatible ringtone--something you normally need an application like iToner or Garageband (both Mac-only apps) to create. There's also a WAP-friendly URL to simply grab the audio file on your handset without having to sync to your desktop. Whatever you've created gets put into a pool of other songs, and you can even see and download other ringtones from the same artist that have been created by other users when you're all done.

See also:
Bring the canaries, we're going ToneMining
3Guppies gets media to your mobile
Pocketfuzz: Create your own ringtones, sort of

Edit MP3 tracks into ringtones for your phone without software or visual distractions using Audiko.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Twiddla takes home SXSW award despite sluggish performance

Collaborative whiteboarding applications can be handy tools for small groups looking to do some brainstorming despite geographical displacement. Meet Twiddla, a free tool that lets you mark up media and live Web sites, or simply organize ideas together on a virtual whiteboard. It also tacks on live communication with text chat and free VoIP conference calling that doesn't require additional plug-ins or software.

The application won an award for technical achievement at last night's SXSW Interactive Web Awards. While technologically fantastic, in my testing I ran up against some noticeable speed and local resource problems. At times I found the application to be nearly unusable despite its simple interface and snappy menus. At other times it was incredibly responsive.

In any case, Twiddla's packing a lot of features that might attract users of premium paid collaborative services such as ConceptShare and Octopz who are seeking a very simple way to get feedback on Web design or photography. It could also easily replace WebEx for a large number of people who use the tool simply for its text chat and shared work space.

One of Twiddla's killer applications is the built-in screenshot tool. It will snap the current iteration of the whiteboard and save it into both your saved media folder and the meeting's history archive. For photo or Web design consulting, this gives you the option of coming back to a work space and editing content asynchronously.

I'm holding off on giving Twiddla a thumbs up for the time being. It simply didn't perform as well as I think it should to make me ditch some of the alternatives. However, I'm happy to see some little guys come up and show WebEx and others like the recently Google-acquired Marratech what can be done on the user interface side to make these tools simple and attractive.

Read Web pages at the same time with others, and make live markups to a site on the fly. You can also chat live with others either via text or VoIP conference calling.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Let's get this out of the way before I go any further. Poodz is a terrible name for a start-up, but I'm willing to give the founders a break since the more understandable Podz.com is parked, and the developers are French--so maybe there's something lost in translation. The default brown on brown color scheme however might be in poor taste.

The service is best described as a Twitter that adds photos, videos, and sound clips. This can be managed over the web or on your mobile phone. Any combination of content can be sent via MMS, which includes whatever videos or photos you've captured on your mobile device. The entire operation is similar to Pownce, in throwing mixed media sharing together into one big pool and seeing what happens.

While the site is entirely in French, once you've registered you can swap back and forth between French and English localizations; however, users of both languages are kept in the same pool, which can result to some trips to Google Translate or simply ignoring responses or messages you don't understand.

Poodz lets you pick what type of content you want to microblog. In this case it's video.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Poodz does a few things better than the competition. For one, it's got tags and a robust search engine. While the search engine is limited to users and channels (more on those later), the tags are really well implemented and let you dig through posts you've made quickly and easily. It's also very good about separating your post types, by placing little photo, video, text, and audio icons to the left of each of your post. Each of these also constitutes a specific RSS feed, so if you felt like only subscribing to a friend's video feed, you could skip the other message types entirely. You can also take any audio or video recorded on the site and embed it elsewhere. Twitter-a-holics can even plugin their login and cross-post messages to the service every time they tweet.

The other key differentiator is the integrated social discussion network called channels. It's the equivalent of e-mail newsgroups, but it uses the same system as the content posting, letting members post whatever they want as long as it has to do with the channel theme. Each channel can have casual observers, or full on moderators who get to treat the channel content like posts on their own accounts--editing and deleting at their discretion. It's an interesting concept, and something that's been a requested feature from Twitter users for a long time now.

So is Poodz worth ditching Twitter, Pownce, et al to join? While more feature rich, and customizable, the crux of these services is all about the community and where your friends are. It's an unfortunate truth that nearly all of these services face a similar battle for user attention that any other new social network has when launching in a world of giants like MySpace and Facebook. However, if Orkut's taught us anything, your service can be hot in a few specific parts of the world and do just fine.

Related: Seesmic, Utterz, and EyeJot.

Poodz shares a lot in common with other microblogging services with the exception that it lets you share audio, video, and picture files, as well as interact with others in groups both public and private.

(Credit: CNET Networks)