Google Video

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia

Google Video is a new service in beta from Google that allows anyone to upload videos to Google's web servers, and allows people to search and play videos from their search engine. People have been able to upload videos to their web site for a few weeks but only on June 27 did more information about their services become available.

From their About page:

Our mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.

Their aim will be to have all TV shows, and a large quantity of video available, and fully searchable. They currently have 2 types of entries: the ones uploaded from individual users are viewable for free, and videos uploaded by a list of companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN, etc.) will be viewable for a fee, details of which are still unclear.

Currently, users outside U.S.A cannot play videos of this service, when a viewer tries to play a video and he's not in the supported countries he got the following message:

Thanks for your interest in Google Video.
Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn't available in your country.
We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.

Viewers

New method

The videos are shown using the Macromedia Flash Player, which most users already have pre-installed, so typically, no extra plugins are required to be installed. This method allows users to pause, rewind, and seek within a video, features which were not present in the old method. Another new feature is the ability to view 10-second clips of the video while viewing the search results

Old method

You previously had to do the following to view videos:

To view the videos, users can download the Google Video Viewer, an application based on VideoLAN 0.8.2 (according to their About page). The program currently only runs on Microsoft Windows, and Google has released the source code for it. Alternatively, for computers that do not have the viewer installed, there is a Macromedia Flash viewer that plays the video inside a user's web browser.

There is a free, user-created script called Embedded Player -> Link Converter for the Greasemonkey extension for the Firefox browser that allows users of any OS to stream Google Video through the application of their choice. It can be found here. Note that you must have Greasemonkey installed to run this script.

Uploader program

Similarly, users have to download the Google Video Uploader in order to upload videos. This program is available on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

See also

• List of Google services and tools

External links

• Google Video
• Source code
• Homepage for the Greasemonkey script.
• Other recent news on Google Video.

Google Guide made by MultiMedia | Free content and software

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.