Google Video to the Rescue

Rave

I’ve always grumbled when a friend sent me a link to a video. Inevitably, the site containing the video offers it to me in a variety of formats–usually RealPlayer, Windows Media, and Quicktime.

First of all, I have media players for all three of those formats on my computer. But none of them work with said video, because said video uses some codec I don’t have–which my player is utterly unhelpful about pointing me to–or because my copy of the media player is way out of date (meaning, of course, that it’s more than a week old).

Hence, the grumble. I’ve always expected to see a torn and broken filmstrip icon when I click on a video file link, or audio playing without any video, or a dialog box telling me I need to get the latest version of the software.

But Google Video fixes that. Because Google Video uses Macromedia Flash Player–which most people’s computers already have installed–to stream me my video. For one thing, I never even have to choose what video player I want to try; for another thing, I never have to worry about not having the right codecs, not having the right version of software on my computer, or anything else. Google Video just works.

Aside from that, of course, the biggest problem I’ve had with streaming video is the fact that it doesn’t usually stream, but trickle, leading to an annoying sputter of half-formed video. And somehow, Google Video fixes that too. (Sometimes I wonder if those Google folks signed their souls away for infinite bandwidth, but I guess that’s not my problem.)

And aside from all that, of course, Google Video has lots of video. So when a friend of mine sent me a link to What If Microsoft Redesigned the iPod Packaging? and it gave me headaches, I just Google Video’ed it.

And it just worked.

So here’s a tip: if anyone ever wants to give you a movie and links to some weird ad-laden, popup-strewn movie site that you’ve never heard of, try using Google Video instead. Your eyes, your patience, and your peace of mind will thank you.

Unfortunately, you’re just avoiding the problem by picking a single standard. I never have to worry about other video being embedded because I have all the codecs set up using mplayer, and embedded into the browser.

On the other hand, if I want to check out the lyrics on someone’s MySpace account, I can’t, because Macromedia Flash for Linux is broken.

So unfortunately, the only lesson learned is to use the format that *most* of your customers will have. And most customers do in fact, not only have Windows Media Player, but the latest wmv codecs as well.

While what you’re saying is true, my point is rather that end-users shouldn’t have to worry about what a codec is, or whether they have the latest version of a piece of software installed. My frustration with the way most embedded movie players work is the fact that their expectations towards the user are completely inhumane: not only do they expect the user to manually update their software at a high frequency–which may also involve restarting their browser and a number of other inconveniences–but they also give the end-user next to zero information about what’s going wrong when a movie doesn’t play. For instance, it would be helpful if a movie player at least told the user what codec they needed to play a movie; it would be humane if the movie player actually fetched the codec automatically and then started playing the movie, with no intervention required on the part of the user. Instead, the user gets a torn and broken filmstrip icon, or nothing happens when they press the “play” button, or something else completely unhelpful happens.

So, while Google’s solution isn’t 100% ideal, I think that it is a solution created with the end-user in mind: it requires a version of a media player that was released almost 3 years ago, that exists on all platforms and is already installed on most computers, and it entirely relieves the end-user of having to worry about codecs.

And it’s unfortunate that Flash Player is broken on Linux right now; I didn’t realize that. Hopefully Macromedia will get around to fixing that soon, because–as much as I hate programming in it–their player seems fairly vital to the way the web works these days.

Yes.
I want to bear Google Video’s children.

The only thing is I wanted to upload all my videos and get them off my hard drive, and I downloaded the Google Video Upload program, and my videos did not upload. I don’t know why. I should try it again, I suppose…

“And it’s unfortunate that Flash Player is broken on Linux right now; I didn’t realize that.”
????

I was watching Google videos on a Linux machine the other day. Perhaps the one embedded in myspace is different, (not like myspace does ANYTHING right with its user interface at ALL), but the one on google video worked.

You’re right. Programmers don’t put in the effort for little details to be automatic. See ESR’s rant about the usability of UNIX printing, too.

For what it’s worth, Windows Media Player does attempt to download codecs, but it does an awful job of it, probably because it doesn’t like non-Microsoft-approved codecs.

Also the music player in MySpace plays the music, but all the options for voting, downloading, seeing the lyrics, or even the song titles are not there. Could just be my player, but still.