Category Archives: youtube

Send that presentation to YouTube

If you are creating a presentation then generally most people use PowerPoint. Personally I now create virtually all my presentations using Apple’s Keynote. One of the many reasons I like Keynote is the way it handles images, audio and video compared to PowerPoint.

One of the features of Keynote that I have always liked is the ability to save a presentation as a movie file. As once a movie file it can be converted in many different ways. For a JISC online conference I did this and then converted into multiple mobile formats. Of course once a movie file you could upload your presentation to YouTube.

In version 4.0 of Keynote (part of iWork ’08) you can now send your presentation direct to YouTube.

Keynote to YouTube

This avoids the need to export the file and then upload to YouTube, you can upload direct to YouTube quickly and easily.

I’ve not yet tried it, but I can see after attending a conference I could upload my presentation and then embed it into my blog or the organisers could embed into their website. It also avoids the problems that you can have with Keynote files as not everyone has Keynote and even if you export as PowerPoint, not everyone has PowerPoint.

YouTube introduces advertising…

So there I was blogging about how we use video on our VLE where I did mention that some of the staff were using YouTube.

Now one of the nice things about YouTube was the “lack” of “in your face” advertising, however it is now looking like that could be a thing of the past!

Video advertising has started on the YouTube website, its owner – internet giant Google – has confirmed.

Google said it had designed the way the adverts work on the video-sharing website to be as unobtrusive and undisruptive as possible.

The adverts will begin 15 seconds after a user has started to watch a video, but only on 20% of the screen window.

Google said the advert would then disappear within 10 seconds if the user had not clicked to watch it.

Read more, source BBC.

Video on the VLE

I have over the years looked at how we can store and use digital video to support and enhance learning. Generally small video clips seem to work better online (just look at the success of YouTube) rather than whole programmes.

Though having said that I am currently enjoying the BBC Archive trial and the BBC iPlayer beta and on both of those I am watching full length programmes. However I am watching it for entertainment rather than educational – raises another question, is there a such a stark difference between entertainment and learning these days?

We are storing video clips we use on the VLE (we use Moodle) using the Flash Video format. Though some staff are using YouTube or TeacherTube.

Our Flash video generally streams “okay” both inside and outside the college.

I have found that using Quicktime H.264 encoded files results in a similar file size, but much better quality. This was particularly evident with the Italian Language programme I used as my example, where the audio was out of sync with the video when using Flash video which would have proved difficult for language students to follow the foreign language.

h.264 video

However it does require that the client have Quicktime installed and though this is a free download for users outside the college, the Quicktime player we have installed on college machines is not capable of playing H.264 content.

The main advantage of encoding H.264 was the time it took to encode the files. Though quality and final file size were also advantageous.

To encode a 15 minute MPEG2 Freeview recording took around 15 minutes on my iMac.

To encode the same 15 minute MPEG2 recording as a FLV file took about five to six hours… and then I needed to create a Flash object which contained the FLV video file.

We now have a 15 minute limit on files just because anything longer will take too long to download. For those video recordings/files we put them on DVD and allow the students to view them via a DVD player.

Longer term for larger videos we are aiming to have a media/video server, but this will be mainly aimed at streaming internally.