GOOGLE VIDEO

'Google Video' is a free video sharing and video search engine service from Google that allows anyone to upload video clips to Google's web servers as well as make their own media available free of charge; some videos are also offered for sale through the Google Video Store.
Users can search and play these uploaded videos directly from the Google Video website, as well as download video files and remotely embed them on their web pages.
Uploaded videos were saved as a .gvi files under the "Google Videos" folder in "My Videos" and reports of the video(s) details are logged and stored in the user account. The report sorts and lists the number of times that each of the users videos have been viewed and downloaded within a specific time frame. These range from the previous day, week, month or the entire time that the videos have been there for. Totals are calculated and displayed and the information can be downloaded into a spreadsheet format or printed out.
Competing services include iFilm, Metacafe, Veoh, blip.tv and Outloud.tv. On October 9, 2006 Google agreed to buy former competitor YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, but YouTube will remain a separate service under its own identity for the near future, though Google video searches include YouTube results as well.^[1]
Google announced on June 13, 2007 that the Google Video search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, in addition to YouTube's and their own uploads. Search result links now open a frameset with a Google Video header at the top, and the original player page below it, similar to the way the Google Images search results are presented.

Contents

Video content

Video distribution methods

Flash Video

Google Video Player

GVI format and conversion

AVI and MP4

Third-party download services

External embedding of Google Video files

Uploading videos

Market adoption

Availability of service

Criticisms

References

See also

External links

Video content

Google Video is geared towards providing a large archive of freely searchable videos. Besides amateur media, Internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aims to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies.
A number of educational discourses by Google employees have been recorded and available for viewing via Google Video. The lectures have been done mainly at the employee's former universities. The topics cover Google technologies and software engineering but also include other pioneering efforts by major players in the software engineering field.
Various media companies offer content on Google Video for purchase, including CBS programs, NBA, music videos, and independent film. Initially, the content of a number of broadcasting companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN) was available as free streaming content or stills with closed captioning. In addition, the U.S. National Archive uses Google Video to make historic films available online.^[2]
Google Video also searches other non-affiliated video sites from web crawls. Sites searched by Google Video in addition to their own videos and YouTube include GoFish, Vimeo, MySpace, Biku, and Yahoo Video. It appears that Google Video is moving away from a online video archive and towards a search engine for videos, similar to their web and image searches.
As of August 15th, in Google's effort to provide better expectations in service, the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program will end and all users who have previously purchased a video from Google Video will no longer be viewable regardless. The paid amounts are to be reimbursed for the amount they paid as values for Google Checkout and are valid for 60 days.

Video distribution methods

Google Video offers both free services and commercial videos, the latter controlled with digital rights management.

Flash Video

The Google Video Player displays a Flash Video (.flv) file in a Flash-enabled browser. The flash video file is in Adobe Flash format, and requires that the Adobe Flash plugin be installed in the web browser (the latest version of this plugin is called Adobe Flash Player 9). The plugin is available at Adobe's website.
The browser automatically caches the flash file while it plays, and it can be retrieved from the browser's cache once it has fully played. In the Windows 9x the default location for this cache is at "%windir%Temporary Internet Files" whereas it is located at "%userprofile%Local SettingsTemporary Internet Files" in Windows 2000/XP. This flash file will play in Media Player Classic (provided that ffdshow is installed), MPlayer, or in the standalone Wimpy flash player, amongst others. In Mac OS X you can playback .flv files in SWF & FLV Player, In Windows you can playback .flv file in FLV Player.

Google Video Player

'Google Video Player' was another way to view Google videos; it run on Windows and Mac OS X. The Google Video Player rendered files in Google's own Google Video File (.gvi) media format and supported playlists in "Google Video Pointer" (.gvp) format. When users downloaded to their computers, the resulting file used to be a small .gvp (pointer) file rather than a .gvi file. When run, the .gvp file would download a .gvi (movie) file to the user's default directory.
As of 17 August 2007, Google Video Player has been discontinued and is no longer available for download from Google Video website. The option to download videos in GVI format has also been removed, the only download option remaining for iPod/PSP (MP4 format).
While early versions of Google's in-browser video player code were based on the open source VLC Media Player, the last version of Google Video Player was not based on VLC, according to its readme file. However, it did include the OpenSSL cryptographic toolkit and some libraries from the Qt widget toolkit.^[3]

GVI format and conversion

Google Video Files (.gvi), and latterly its .avi files, are modified Audio Video Interleave (.avi) files that have an extra list containing the FourCC "goog" immediately following the header. The list can be removed with a hex editor to avoid playback issues with various video players.^[4][5] The video is encoded in DivX4 alongside an MP3 audio stream. DivX video players can render .gvi Google Video Files without format conversion (after changing the extension from .gvi to .avi, although this method of just renaming the file extension does not work with videos purchased with DRM to inhibit unauthorized copying). Among other software VirtualDub is able to read .gvi files and allows the user to convert them into different formats of choice. There are also privately developed software solutions, such as GVideo Fix, that can convert them to .avi format without recompression. MEncoder with "-oac copy -ovc copy" as parameters also suffices.

AVI and MP4

Besides GVI and Flash Video, Google provides its content through downloadable Audio Video Interleave (.avi) and MPEG-4 (.mp4) video files. Not all formats are available through the website's interface, however, depending on the user's operating system.
Where available, Google's "save as" function for Windows/Mac will produce an .avi file, while the "save as" function for iPod and PSP will produce an .mp4 file.
The .avi file is not in standard .avi format. To play the file in a popular media player such as Winamp or Windows Media Player, the file must first be modified using a hex editor (for example the XVI32.exe editor) to delete the first LIST block in the file header, which starts at byte 12 (000C hex, first byte in file is byte 0) and ends at byte 63 (003F hex).^[4][5] Optionally, the file length (in bytes 4 to 7, little endian) should then be amended by subtracting 52 (3F hex - 0C hex = 33 hex).
Winamp and Windows Media Player cannot play the unmodified .avi file because the non-standard file header corrupts the file. However, Media Player Classic, MPlayer and the VLC Media Player will play the unmodified .avi file, and the Google .mp4 file. Media Player Classic only if an MPEG4 DirectShow Filter such as ffdshow is installed. Most Linux media players Xine, Totem, the Linux version of the VLC Media Player and Kaffiene have no problems with Google's .avi.
An .mp4 file will play in Winamp if an MPEG4/H.264 DirectShow Filter such as ffdshow and an MP4 Splitter such as Haali are installed, and the extension ;MP4 is added to the Extension List in the Winamp DirectShow decoder configuration.

Third-party download services

Google offers users the means to save only some of the videos on the site, mostly for copyright reasons. Their documentation goes so far as to claim that only these videos can be downloaded. However, since viewing a video requires downloading it to the computer, their software merely makes it an inconvenience to save downloaded videos on the computer. A number of solutions to this problem, including external software and bookmarklets, have been developed.
Third party browser extensions^[8][9][10], bookmarklets^[11], and download helper websites^[12] facilitate direct and straightforward downloading of all available formats and offer access to users of operating systems not officially supported by the Google Video downloading system.

External embedding of Google Video files

Google Video allows select videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provides the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube. This allows for websites to host large amounts of video remotely on Google Video without running into bandwidth or storage capacity issues.

Uploading videos

Users may choose to upload videos either through the Google Video website [1] (limited to 100MB per file); or alternatively through the Google Video Uploader, available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Major producers with a thousand or more hours of video can apply for Google's Premium Program^[13].
While the Video Uploader application is available as three separate downloads, the Linux version is written in Java, a cross-platform programming language, and will therefore also work on other operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, without modifications, providing that the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is installed. Also worthy of note is the fact that this Java executable (.jar) file is a standalone application that does not require installation. Consequently, it can be run from removable media such as USB flash drives, CD-ROMs, or network storage. This allows users to upload video even if the computer terminal on which they are working will not allow them to install programs, such as a public library computer.
Unlike YouTube, users are provided with reports on how many views each video has received over different periods of time. Each video display not only how many views total, but how many were viewed in the previous day, and provides a chart of the past few days. YouTube does not provide any method to compute daily or views over a period of time. However, there is no user page, and these reports are not available to be viewed by other users. YouTube does report the total number of video views for each user, however, which Google Video does not. Although there is no option to download videos on YouTube itself, some download manager, such as orbit downloader,Moyea FLV Downloader allow the video to be downloaded as an FLV file, by simply copying the URL address of the video page and paste it in download Task dialog box

Market adoption

Despite availability of downloading in multiple formats, being less restrictive on video uploads, and Google being tremendously well-known, Google Video had only a minor share from the online video market. According to one poll, Google Video has about 8%, while YouTube has about 27%^[14] Users who have posted videos to both sites may have noted an increase in YouTube traffic, and a decline in Google Video share.

Availability of service

While initially only available in the United States, over time Google Video has become available to users in more countries and can now be accessed from many other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India and Japan.
Regardless of general availability, content providers are given the opportunity to limit access to video files to only users from certain countries of residence. However, methods of circumventing geographical filtering exist.

Criticisms

Google Video has little organization of content and no noticeable pricing scheme^[15][16]. However, pay content (available currently in the United States only) is arranged in a few categories. A video ranking in the form of a Top 100 has been introduced and the official Google Video Blog features "Google Picks" (videos considered noteworthy by Google) on a regular basis. "Google Picks" are currently also available via the Google Video homepage.
The strategy for Google Video has shifted dramatically from an initial focus on digitizing offline content, akin to Google BookSearch, to then later focusing on fee-based downloads akin to iTunes, to then later focusing on social networking features akin to YouTube. Despite constant product development and business development churn, Google Video had never attained market leadership in the online video space at the time when Google acquired YouTube.
While the lack of a fixed pricing scheme may be perceived as confusing by a number of users, it does offer content providers a wider scope in terms of individual pricing. Whether this pricing concept will be accepted and retained beyond beta remains to be seen.
There has also been criticism regarding varying standards used by Google on evaluating the content of each video for suitability. For example, Google might accept a video featuring graphic violence and profanity, but reject a milder one, with no apparent means of objective analysis.
The video uploading tool also receives various complaints, due to its "Uploading failed" error message which seems to appear in random cases without any explanation why the upload was not successful. This message sometimes also appears when the upload was successful which can be problematic as the same video may be uploaded again. Google has not yet addressed this issue. ^[17]
Additional criticism of Google Video has been on a lack of end user tools to add tables of content and chapters to the videos, which make longer format videos easier to annotate, view, navigate and understand.

References

1. Google buys YouTube for .65 billion
2. National Archives and Google Launch Pilot Project (...) (NARA press release, published on 2006-02-24)
3. Copyrights for Google Video Player, noting the inclusion of several open source libraries
4. Removing the "goog" list from a Google Video file (tutorial video)
5. Comprehensive FAQ related to video downloads
6. Removing the "goog" list from a Google Video file (tutorial video)
7. Comprehensive FAQ related to video downloads
8. VideoDownloader extension for the Firefox browser
9. VideoDownloader widget for the Opera browser
10. Greasemonkey (an extension for the Firefox browser) or Opera, with corresponding user scripts from zeekat.nl or userscripts.org
11. Google Video Download Bookmarklets (download Google Video files in FLV, AVI and MP4 format)
12. videodownloader.net, keepvid.com, javimoya.com, clipnabber.com, VidGrabber.com, VideoDL.org (download helper websites)
13. http://services.google.com/inquiry/video
14. Google Video, YouTube and MySpace Vids: An Update, August 16, 2006
15. Google Video: Trash Mixed With Treasure (a ''New York Times'' editorial, by David Pogue, published on 2006-01-19)
16. C|net Editor's Review For Google Video (Beta) (edited by James Kim, reviewed by Troy Dreier on 2006-02-07)
17. http://vewgle.com/showthread.php?t=170

See also

★ Comparison of video services

★ YouTube

★ vMix

★ GoFish

★ Metacafe

★ Youare.tv

★ Dailymotion

★ MSN Soapbox

★ blip.tv

★ Videosift

★ Google

★ Google search

External links

★ Google Video