Tagged: video hosting Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Dave Bonta 11:34 am on April 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: MediaElement, video hosting, ,   

    WordPress 3.6 will have native support for video and audio 

    If you’ve ever wanted to start your own video hosting site, it’s about to get easier. WordPress 3.6, currently in beta and due out soon, supports video and audio in core — it’s no longer necessary to use a plugin to generate media players for files uploaded to one’s own or another site.

    At the core of the experience is the fantastic library, MediaElement.js. MediaElement is the facade layer that gives us maximum file support and cross-browser compatibility. While some libraries require a Flash-only solution to make your media work cross-environment, MediaElement lets you use HTML5 audio / video tags in every browser, and, only when necessary, will use a Flash or Silverlight plugin in the background to make incompatible media work. [...]

    MediaElement uses the same HTML markup, regardless of playback implementation, and you can use CSS to skin the players.

    This provides a great deal of security for publishers, who will no longer have to rely on someone keeping an essential plugin updated. I would caution however that this new ease of use should not lure cash-strapped bloggers on cheap, shared hosting accounts (ahem, like me) to think that they can become the next Poetry Visualized. Hosting and reliably streaming a lot of videos, or videos that become too popular, will remain a high-resource enterprise. But for bigger organizations and institutions who want to retain full control of branding, and whose editorial staff aren’t highly tech-y, it should make video hosting a bit easier. Another use-case I can think of is the video artist who wants to share her work only on her own site and prevent others from embedding it, something that requires a paid membership at Vimeo.

    In general, I think YouTube and Vimeo will remain preferable for most filmmakers and videopoets (and embedding such third-party videos in WordPress posts couldn’t be easier with the oEmbed functionality they added a couple of years ago), but it’s good to have this option in case the corporations decide to screw us.

     

  • Dave Bonta 3:26 pm on February 26, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , video hosting,   

    New version of Vimeo allows searching by Creative Commons license 

    A Vimeo redesign unveiled in late January for the first time allows users of the popular video hosting site to search for Creative Commons-licensed films. So far, the new design is available only to logged-in users on an opt-in basis. A “filters” box becomes visible on the upper right after one performs an initial search. A drop-down menu within the box allows one to filter the search results by each type of Creative Commons license — Attribution, Attribution-ShareAlike, etc. — but not all of them at once, or all of the ones that are free to modify (i.e. excluding those with “no derivatives” provisions). So it’s pretty basic yet, but better than nothing.

    This is significant for videopoem/filmpoem makers looking for high-quality footage for a quick web project. For anything more elaborate, one would still probably want to do a general search, including traditionally copyrighted videos, and plan on asking permission. If using Creative Commons-licensed work, filmmakers should of course abide by the terms of the license, which at minimum means including the attribution in the film’s credits, and may also mean including the terms of the license and even licensing one’s own remix the same way (in the case of a “Share Alike” license), unless one gets specific permission from the copyright holder to waive those requirements. Please see my page of web resources for videopoem makers for links to more information on using Creative Commons-licensed material (as well as other sources of free-to-use video and the like).

     

  • Dave Bonta 5:51 pm on November 25, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , video hosting, ,   

    “Video & Film Poetry” group on Vimeo 

    The video sharing site Vimeo tends to get a higher proportion of well-made videos than YouTube, but even still, many poetry-related videos uploaded to the site are not terribly impressive as examples of the filmmaker’s art. I know, because one of the primary ways I find new material for Moving Poems is by searching new Vimeo uploads for anything with the word “poem” in the title, tags or description. I see a lot of dreck.

    So I’m very impressed with the new Vimeo group devoted to Video & Film Poetry, which was founded by Brenda Clews just a couple months ago. She had tried to convince me to start such a group, but I declined on the grounds that I was already doing enough here, so she went ahead and founded the group herself — and I think the results so far speak for themselves: a lot of interesting and innovative videopoets have joined the group now, and are adding their new uploads as well as other people’s videos that they might happen to know about. There’s some commenting, but so far it’s been mainly a place to share and discover new work.

    This isn’t the first Vimeo group to welcome poetry videos, but I believe it’s the first to take curating seriously. The problem with completely open poetry-sharing sites is that the bad poetry (or videopoetry, in this case) tends to drive out the good. The crucial difference with the Video & Film Poetry group is that, though anyone can comment or participate in the (so-far-unused) forums, only members can add videos or invite new members. If you’re on Vimeo and you’d like an invitation, let me know.

     

  • Dave Bonta 3:32 pm on December 21, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , video hosting   

    Vimeo unveils video school 

    The freemium video sharing site Vimeo, source of the majority of videos featured at Moving Poems, has just unveiled what it calls Vimeo Video School, “a one-stop shop for Vimeo Lessons and user-made video tutorials about a variety of video-making topics.” For those of us who didn’t go to film school, this looks like a great way to get up to speed on professional filmmaking techniques.

     

  • Dave Bonta 7:32 pm on June 24, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Blogger, video hosting, vuvuzela,   

    Video-hosting news 

    YouTube has added a vuvuzela button to all its videos. As a fan of noise rock and dissonant avant-garde classical, I’m cheered by this decision to embrace the sonic chaos of the 2010 World Cup. Sadly, however, this option is not included on embeds, so Moving Poems visitors will have to click through to YouTube itself to hear Sylvia Plath or Linh Dinh accompanied by the drone of a cheap plastic horn.

    In other video-blogging news from the Blog Herald, the folks at Blogger have dramatically improved their free video-hosting system, but they still don’t allow embedding. Given that Blogger also doesn’t have an export tool that allows people to take their files with them, people who upload videos to Blogger at this point are basically consigning their uploads to a Blogger lockbox.

     

c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
l
go to login
h
show/hide help
shift + esc
cancel