How does YouTube work? And should you download the videos?

Although the title says YouTube videos, this post discusses any other similar video sharing sites. The technology that YouTube and other sites use may be something like this:

You upload your videos in any of the formats that YouTube accepts.
YouTube then converts your video to the FLV format -- this Flash based format is more suitable for viewing the content online.
You are provided a URL where this FLV content is embedded.
You can then share this URL with anyone, or use some embedding code to place the video on your site. The code that you embed sources the FLV from the YouTube site. At any point of time, you are not provided a direct download URL for the FLV file itself.

Although it is possible to do so, sites like YouTube don't really want visitors to be able to download the actual FLVs. However many programs and hacks have been developed that get over this limitation.

There's also another aspect to this download issue: plainly, you may be breaking copyright rules if you download content that belongs to someone else.

And there's yet another thought, that of the video quality. Most of the content on YouTube is compressed so that the videos can play well over all types of Internet connections. Sometimes, you can request the original owner of the video for a higher quality copy. This approach also allows you to request their permission to use the video clip.

Labels: movie, share, youtube

1 Comments:

At January 15, 2008 11:59 PM , Alex said...: How to upload PowerPoint to YouTube?

Since YouTube accepts only video files from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones in the WMV, AVI, MOV, and MPEG file formats. But we all know that our PowerPoint presentations are not video formats and Microsoft also doesn't support this conversion. So we need third party software to complete this process, and we also don't want to lose any voice-over, movies, animations and transitions in the PowerPoint during the converting. The converted video PowerPoint presentation should play as the original. A product called Acoolsoft PPT2Video Converter will make this work like a piece of cake!

Acoolsoft PPT2Video Converter is an all-in-one PowerPoint to video converter. It can convert PowerPoint presentations to almost all popular video formats such as MPEG, AVI, MP4, WMV, ASF, FLV, MOV, 3GP, 3GP2. Ideal for trade show, digital signature, in-store displays and ready for video podcast.

When you decided to use this tool to convert your PowerPoint presentation to video, I recommend the following settings:
• MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format: WMV format is smaller than MPEG-4, if your PowerPoint file is too big, I recommend you choose this format
• 640×480 resolution
• MP3 audio: Commonly, there are many audio formats but have little difference
• 29.97 frames per second: Choose frames which closer with this level
Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your videos look better on YouTube. Once you've finished editing your video, made sure it's less than 10 minutes, smaller than 100MB, and in an acceptable format, you're ready to upload it.