YouTube update

I finally went through the latest "update" of my YouTube channel and got the mandatory Google+ page.

Now I have to figure out how to use the new interface/controls for my YouTube channel. Oh, joy.

Even after all these years YouTube couldn't provide a simple interface for uploading and managing files. It is ironic to be batting the crappy channel manager's interface of YouTube while they proudly proclaim that it is "geek week". Using the channel art editing tool triggers a cross-site scripting warning from my browser (see below)....

 ....and magically brings up a useless Google Docs file search dialog window.

The folks at YouTube gave us the ability to upload a 2560 x 1440 pixel splash image for our YouTube channels, but at the same time they put a 2Mbyte limit on the size of the image file. If you upload a file that is over that size limit, you get no message saying that you are over the limit...YouTube simply refuses to display your image. For months now this has been driving channel managers crazy and they've sought help from Google/YouTube's crappy online help system and, of course, the geeks at YouTube have never fixed the problem.

The tools for controlling which videos from a channel get displayed to people and in what order remain primitive and annoying.

Popular
The image to the right shows other YouTube channels that the brilliant software of YouTube suspects I might be interested in. I suppose that since I have a playlist for animations their software algorithm will direct me towards...whatever these channels are. Ew.

Just Does Not Work
The image above shows how YouTube is supposed to display the profile image from Google+ on the YouTube Channel banner. The image below (lower left) shows that YouTube sometimes fails to retrieve and display the profile image.

I specified a video to be shown to new people who visit my YouTube channel and tested how it looks (see image above, right). It was funny...the audio could be heard playing but there was no video!

Quote: "Oh, go f*** yourself, Google."

Thanks for the update, YouTube!

Google is not evil, it only feels that way

2012 update on YouTube audio problems.

I tried to add a link to the update from the original post on this blog, but I got this amusing error message:

Wiki Drama

I've been experimenting with GoAnimate as a way to make video animations.

"Biographies of Living People" is the first in a series of videos about Wikipedia and Wikiversity.



GoAnimate uses Flash and like many video "applications" it is a hardware beast: I suggest using the latest version of Flash, a fast processor and plenty of memory. GoAnimate runs on "the cloud" and was off-line for a day recently when the cloud dried up.

After playing around with the free version of GoAnimate for a week, I got an email offer of a one month trial account for GoPlus. The trial GoPlus account allows you to get around their restriction on access to the GoAnimate voice-to-text feature. Also the trial GoPlus account gave me the ability to make a video that was longer than 2 minutes. This one is my longest, so far. In my experience, when a video starts getting to about 2 minutes and it has a large number of elements, then the whole GoAnimate video editing interface can start to slow down. I've had several crashes and once I lost about 20 minutes of video editing when I got a message saying that the save function had failed.

The best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for converting your GoAnimate videos to Youtube videos. The second best "feature" is the ability to mix together characters from different GoAnimate character sets ("channels"). For example, when starting a video in the Star Trek channel you also get access to some characters from 11 other "channels". The third best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for image uploads.

Bad Audio

I noticed that some of my old YouTube videos now have corrupted audio.

New version of Embryos from Earth:


I replaced the audio of the Old version:


An example of a video with corrupted audio:

Xtranormal video

Wiki technology began as a tool that facilitates collaborative authoring of webpages. We can go beyond text and add images and sounds to our webpages. I just created a short video for some dialog from the story Cellular Civilization. I used the xtranormal website to make the video clip. You can arrange to have your video creations uploaded to YouTube.

The Xtranormal video making system is still being developed, but it is easy to use and fun. There are some problems with their test-to-speech, but it is not too bad for the price (free). Since it is hard to understand some of the spoken words, I used the YouTube feature for adding captions. This is easy to do using a word processor, saving the captions as a text file and using the .sub file format (see the online instructions).

In this scene, Dexamene Gregores and Charles Parker are chatting. Dexamene is on a secret mission and Charlie is baffled by Dex and is trying hard to figure out who Dexamene is and what she us up to.

Related link: fiction wikia media project

YouTube and copyright

When I go to
http://www.youtube.com/my_account
I get a message saying:

"You have videos that may contain copyrighted material. Please resolve this."

When I follow the link for "resolve this" there is a button that says
"Copyright Info". When I click on that, I get to a page that says:

You have the following options:

1. Do Nothing

Your video will continue to play uninterrupted everywhere.

This seems odd. Am I missing something?

This has to do with a video that I ran through YouTube's system for adding audio to videos. Apparently YouTube is now giving users copyright warnings for having used audio provided by YouTube. Duh.



I tried to send YouTube support an email about this but I could not even find their current email address. Customer service with a smile.....you know they are laughing at you. I still do not understand the YouTube $$$ model, but while trying to send my email yo YouTube while using gmail I saw this ad:

Free Farting Video - AmazingFartVideos.com - 10 Fart Videos That Changed The World. Watch Free Instantly!

Previous related blog post(the origin of the video/audio remix that is now causing trouble) .

Editing Tutorial

I made a "3D screencast" about how to edit a wiki webpage. This new version replaces the old version that is still available at the Internet Archive. I have been comparing the Internet Archive's Embed Video Format of the new video to the YouTube Embed Video Format.

The YouTube version is not bad. The 640 x 480 pixel OGG video format version at Wikiversity is better.

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Test of the Internet Archive embed flash video player: