Video Not Available

video removed for copyright while similar videos were not?
"we are likely either not aware of them or do not have reason to believe they are infringing"

Well, right, but it is all still mysterious. After three weeks of seeing what items from my video blog become "unavailable", it seems like there must be some people who have the job of requesting take downs of videos...but many of these videos are up for months before they are taken down. Does that mean that the people making the take-down requests do not know how to search YouTube or that the search function is so over-loaded that they cannot find videos until they work their way up in the rankings or can it take months to get YouTube to remove a video?

I've also seen some videos where comments are not allowed (but not many). I might be wrong and not remembering exactly what happened, but I had been looking closely at the two Cat Stevens videos that were in my video log. I had noticed that one had comments blocked, then the next day I found that it was removed from YouTube. Why that one? It would sure be interesting to know what goes on "behind the scenes" of YouTube.

Science Fiction Collaborations

I started a YouTube group as an experimental work group for collaboration on science fiction-related videos (see). I find it frustrating that YouTube has a 500 character limit on "comments", but I guess the logical approach is to have serious text-based work at Wikiversity.

One of the largest YouTube surprises for me has been the "lego video":

Flame

I previously saw some mild bitching about singers such as at The First Cut Is the Deepest by Sheryl Crow. Today I saw some more serious complaining at Peace Train. It is interesting to see that the "art" of the flame war is alive at YouTube.....sorta shows it is a "real" internet community.

I did not realize that there were "love letter" videos submitted from YouTube users to the YouTube staff. See:

Business Model

The YouTube business model includes the strategy of providing hosting for video, attracting people who will watch the videos and getting people to click on ads while they are exploring the YouTube website. The goal is to have the community of YouTube website users and marketers make use of YouTube pages in a mutually beneficial way. YouTube has been exploring a range of strategies for getting companies to pay for access to the eyeballs of the YouTube community.

YouTube has Content Partners and says "content creators are recognizing the potential of promoting themselves and their programming on YouTube". Universal Music Group is an example of a company that makes versions of its music videos available for viewing on YouTube. The YouTube "partners" can agree to run ads on the pages with their videos and share in the marketing value of exposing their video content to the YouTube community.

New York Film Academy must have someone who sends friend requests to people with new YouTube accounts. Anyone can set up a YouTube account and start "networking" within the community as a way to let people know about some outside cause, website or company. I do not really understand the different types of YouTube accounts. dhand34 is a "regular" account but seems fairly aggressive about sending out friend requests.

Copyleft video

I previously updated my Web 2.0 and copyleft video for YouTube, but I was not satisfied with the thumbnail image. Here is a version with a better thumbnail image:

Also, I was reading some blog entries and saw the suggestion that you can get good results on YouTube with Apple's video encoding and every 15th frame a key frame. I tried uploading a video using some of these suggestion and the upload failed. I got no error message, just a generic "web page not found" error message. In any case, I am fairly satisfied with the Sorensen 3 encoding and iMovie's default of a key frame every 24th frame.

TestTube audio tracks

I started exploring TestTube and found the instructions for the AudioSwap feature. I modified my "Mnemtronium" video to use one of the available audio tracks.

Artist: Anchor Mejans
Song: Mark Surrency (from the Cloud selections)

YouTube needs to add a checkbox that will allow you to get a graceful fade-out of the audio when the selected audio track is too long for the video.

See also: The Cloud by Anchor Mejans & Robert Nunnally

Thumbnail images

I edited my Mnemtronium video to add about seven seconds to the end. This made the middle frame of the video file a more interesting thumbnail image for the video. Here is the new version of the video:

Copyleft videos

I previously tested a screencast video that I had made for 640 x 480 resolution. I was not satisfied with the ability of YouTube to show on-screen text that was as small as what I had in that video. Here is a new version of that old video modified for YouTube:

Default 425 x 350 pixels:



320 x 240 pixels:



I hate the fact that there is no control over the thumbnail image used by YouTube!

I wonder if YouTube has any interest in promoting copyleft videos. The Copyright Tips page says, "if you use an audio track of a sound recording owned by a record label without that record label's permission, your video is infringing the copyrights of others, and we will take it down as soon as we become aware of it," which seems to totally ignore the idea that a copyright holder could license their work for re-use by others in the copyleft way.

Groups, Tags and Categories

After looking at a few tags such as internet and wiki I also tried copyleft and then I hit the link for "Try searching for "copyleft" in: Groups" by mistake. That led me to the copyleft group. Sadly only one member. I had previously taken a quick look at Groups and not seen much of value.

Categories
The YouTube categories do not seem very.....comprehensive?

Autos & Vehicles
Comedy
Entertainment
Film & Animation
Gadgets & Games
Howto & DIY
Music
News & Politics
People & Blogs
Pets & Animals
Sports
Travel & Places

I'm wondering if concepts such as copy left will ever find a role in YouTube. Maybe there could be some kind of competition for copyleft videos.

Trick for tags with spaces: free_culture

NEW (beta) version

Last night I got a bunch of "feature temporarily not available" messages at YouTube. Today a "Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!" link is being shown at some YouTube pages. This is one day after I commented on the fact that playslists with more than 10 videos stop playing after 10 videos have played. One of the software changes seems to now allow long playlists to correctly play without stopping after ten videos have played. Another change is that there used to be a link from a playlist to your video log if you previously made that playlist your video log. I no longer see that link, but your video log can still be reached from your main channel page. Update: before the end of the day the video log link was back!

I was expecting to see something about the changes at the Help Center or on the YouTube blog, but there seems to be no information posted. At the blog, I did find out how to remove the "related videos" from embedded videos like this one:



Just add "&rel=0" after the video's URL.

Web 2.0 is not for the rats

I want to be able to make screencasts with readable text for YouTube. Here is an example of a YouTube video from Mike Wesch that has on-computer-screen text:



As a test, I took an existing screencast that was made in 640 x 480 pixel resolution and reduced it to YouTube's suggested 320 x 240:

This video file is a GFDL-licensed compilation ("aggregate") of original work with other separate and independent works as described at its Wikiversity page.

I think text from screencasts needs to be a little larger, but I decided to see if YouTube has an optimized process. I uploaded a nearly 100 MB 640 x 480 version of the above video:

I think the version derived from the large file is slightly better for small text, but not good enough.

Video upload

I just uploaded my first video. I tried two different video formats, Apple's .mov and MPEG4. The MPEG4 file was larger (12 vs 3 MB), but I could not see any difference in quality and how they played. While the video upload system was processing the MOV format file initially showed at YouTube as having a zero duration, but it eventually came through with the correct time. I'm left wondering how to control which frame of a video is used as the static image shown for the video. According to this there is no way to select the thumbnail image besides playing with the content/length of the video. The trick is to have a "cool" image as the middle frame of the video.

Video rendered from the MPEG4 file

Help Desk

After three failures, I finally had some luck associating my YouTube account with this blog. I thought doing so was supposed to make it easier to link from here to YouTube video, but I do not see that anything changed.....of course, the help page does not explain anything.

There is now a Help Desk at the YouTube Wikia. Maybe my first video for YouTube should be a screencast showing how to get to that website.

Embedding video

Video Log 2

Questions about YouTube:

video not available

Today I finally got the red "video not available" message on one of the items in my video log. It would be interesting to know how many videos are removed from YouTube each day because they violate some copyright. Michael Liedtke recently wrote that 200,000 videos are uploaded every day. If only 10% are copyright violations, that represents a huge amount of work for people to request removal and for YouTube to comply with the requests. Maybe most people who own the copyrights see YouTube as a free advertising service. There certainly are companies like Universal Music Group that have gone out of their way to make their music videos available on YouTube. Do these companies get upset if youtubers make and upload their own versions?
(deleted video http://www.youtube.com/v/zxtvHxQllzM)


Video Log 2

You make a YouTube playlist and "add some personality to your Playlist", in particular, you give the Playlist a title. Then you say you want the Playlist to be used as your video log. Then your channel is graced with a video log called "Video Log 2". Um, why?

make playlist icon

What does this button do? I've seen that some people have small images next to their playlists in their list of playlists. I cannot get that to happen.

Attach a Video

Got to someone's channel and click "add a comment". Down at the bottom it says "Attach a Video" and there is a drop-down menu that shows your own videos and some of your favorite videos. So far, I have not uploaded and videos, but this does not seem to do anything with favorite videos.

fetching your blog information

As I write this I'm trying to add this blog to my YouTube channel. After YouTube was "fetching your blog information" for over an hour, I got a "110, 'Connection timed out'" message.

Eyploring YouTube

I'm one week into exploring YouTube and I finally found the help page that explains you can add a blog to your YouTube account. I've also been wanting to try to embed a Youtube video:

I have some questions about using YouTube which I will explore here and at the YouTube Wikia.

Eyploring?
y = f(x) and eyploring is something that comes after exploring. y = youtube and we are exploring what can be done with shared video.

My YouTube channel.