I found myself reflecting on that tag cloud over on the right hand side of this page. Yeah, that’s big. But YOUTUBE looms large in more than just blog tags. Americans don’t typically think to three significant digits, save Denny’s Grand Slam prices (“$1.99 are you out of your MIND?”). But it isn’t just lucky iSchool-grads-turned-YouTube-employees that can recite that ginormous number. Many of us can recite that magic number, ONE POINT SIX FIVE BILLION. As in DOLLARS that GOOG paid for YouTube. YouGoog is a juggernaut. Bitch.
But it’s sad to see a beautifully-designed site mar its aesthetic by inserting a blurry 425×350 placeholder image from YouTube. Readers of this site are clearly familiar with these images, which display a (seemingly random) frame from an embedded YouTube video. Doesn’t this page make you want to get your eyes checked? This site is pretty well designed, except, yick…
I’m saying nothing of the quality of YouTube videos (save that for another post), and I’m not criticizing YouTube as a source of entertainment. On the contrary, I’ve posted my share of embedded vids, and just tonight my friends and I gathered ’round the YouTube at the local cafe (via my MacBook Pro).
But as we surfed around Cute Overload, and as I let my friends in on this this Olde Blogge, I couldn’t help but notice how much of an eyesore these preview frames are. Even sites like Dabble ( a business that started out in the Berkeley School of Information ) that make their living from online video, syndicate these pixelated, aliased images that often tell us nothing about the video’s content.
What solutions can YouTooble give video syndicators and web-site viewers? Clearly the preview has to be fast-loading, as a blank placeholder for a high-res image is awkward in it’s own way. It’d be great if the solution showed the user key frames from the video (multiple images would be nice, but would a slideshow be too distracting?). Perhaps an image that starts out crappy (as it is now), but gets progressively clearer? People who had modems remember how a jpeg looked as it loaded up on a page. GOOGTube has access to the full res video, so, why can’t they give us a good set of screencaps? After all, that was what Google Video (heh) had intended to do just 18 months (aka one YouTube gestation period) ago!
Starting after this post, I’m going to try to increase the size of some of our other tags. Not gonna call it a YouTube fast necessarily.
I’m going to leave you beautiful people with a crystal clear, crisp preview of a Flickr photo, so you won’t be able to blame me for your next optometrist’s bill.
PS if anyone has any idea what algorithm YouTube uses to pick its preview frame, I’d be interested to hear theories.
I agree, it seems bizzare that we can’t get some great screencaps for the YouTube video stills. I’ve also been wondering about how the screencap is chosen for each vid. For example, in the plane video’s I posted about, the first vid’s screencap seems like a fairly random choice, while the second vid shows the exact moment of interest, namely the plane crash. Notably, both chosen pics seem to have fairly large disparity in on screen colors. The first being a mostly blue background with a large red banner, the second being a mostly dark background with a large fireball. Maybe it’s something even simpler though, like the timestamp when most people pause the movie?
best line in the Juggernaut vid @ 2:15 “This is a Dodge”, quickly followed by “I’m made out of laffy-taffy”
Current guess for key frame choice: 1/3 of the way through the video. Any video.
Any counter examples?
Yahoo’s International Remixer uses some kind of social analysis to determine representative frames (I forgot the details).
Ryan Shaw also wrote about it.
I was going to post something about Yahoo’s international Remixer. But I used HTML, and I had to solve a captcha. Unfortunately, the image was broken. After clicking back and forth, all my text was gone, thanks to Ajax.
Anyway, the relevant links are these:
http://media.sffs.org/remix/RemixerDemo.html
http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/wordpress/2006/04/16/international-remix/