Sunday, July 01, 2007

and now on iphone...



Thanks to Sally Govan and Pat.

The technical aspect of this is complicated. As I understand it now, via Pat and Sally and a link to appleinfo, youtube is in the process of converting all its videos to another format.

That's a signifigant blow to Adobe's Flash, I'd think, because up till now, all youtube videos are actually Flash videos, or flvs. You could save any of them to your hard drive by searching them out in your temp files and renaming the extensions .flv. (Applies to PCs of course.) But this was a workaround-- you were supposed to just be viewing them streaming, and streaming sort of implied the video never existed on your hard drive.

Brightcove, which I use for personal videos, is still definitely using flvs. In fact you can do the conversion of your video yourself, in Flash, or upload a video in another format and they convert it to Flash video format.

I'm surprised youtube would make such a big change. I'm guessing the new format is for podcasts, but that also changes things. Before this, you could put your videos on youtube and assume no one could actually save them, just view them. If they are switching to the podcast format, then essentially they are giving them away, which makes me resent youtube, and I imagine others may feel the same way.

I need to follow this closely.

3 comments:

Linda Davick said...

I commented to Sally G that seeing this image on her blog made me swoon. After I hit "publish," I thought: "Oh no. I've never used the word 'swoon' before. I better look it up. The dictionary said:

verb [ intrans. ] faint from extreme emotion ... be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic : teenagers swoon over Japanese pop singers...

I was relieved that I had chosen the right word.

Sally said...

OK, but it's only on Pat's iPhone at this point (as far as we can tell) because he converted it to m4v format and uploaded it directly to his phone.

Anonymous said...

I heard Apple's coming out with an iPod flash player soon.