Video Sharing with eSnips / or how eSnips saved my day/face

Today I received an eMail from a friend, asking for my help posting/hosting two, 12 minutes long, training videos, produced by her company.

“You know this stuff, it should not be a problem for you” she wrote. “What the problem?” I replied, “Just YouTube them …”

As it seems, YouTobe as well as other sites I checked has a 10 minutes length limit. (I guess it has good reasons for that, mainly due to copyrights and people posting TV shows…)

“Send me the files using yousendit and I will cut them into shorter movies” I suggested. (Being as productive and lazy as possible, at the same time). “No” she replied, “We tried that, but the movies have to be presented as is”.

So I had to find another solution.

One option was to simply convert the movies from WMV to FLV and upload them to my friend’s site. But I did not have the right tool installed (yet), due to my recent switch to Mac. I also wanted the movies to play within a player (to allow play, stop, rewind and other operations).


So – back to posting/hosting/sharing solutions…

Recently I learned that videoegg have a great interface, allowing you to edit and convert movies on your local machine before uploading them to their site. I created an account, downloaded the Safari plug in and gave it a try. The process was fast and fun. The only problem was that a water-mark of flip4mac was added to the exported movie… WTF?!

I know they have a great video encoders and converters – but I was not expecting to see this. What good is the videoegg plug-in if it does not provide a complete solution? Should I pay for the convector? Does this really save me time?

Anyway – after a cup of coffee I decided to address this issue not as “video posting” challenge but as a content sharing challenge. I thought about online services I use to host my data.

I’ve checked box.net, but my free account does not allow me to upload files larger than 10mb…

And then I remembered that I am using another site to host a verity of files and formats. eSnips is a content/community portal and service. eSnips supports many content types.






Full of hope, I’ve logged in to my account and set a new public folder. I’ve uploaded the two 90Mb WMV files within few minutes and...

Success!!!

I’ve used the video widget to embed the movies within the eSnips player and send the code to my friend.

As a bonus – the WMV files were converted automatically to FLV, so I could download them for future use.

Talk about a great service!
;-)

So this is how, by the end of the day, I helped my friend and mained my “multimedia guru” reputation.
(At least with her…)

E.T.


PS – This is a movie, demonstrating some of the service features, I found on eSnips.








Technorati Tags multimedia, eSnips, FLV, WMV