A few days ago I got my new Flip Mino HD in the mail. I charged it overnight and then began to play. Last night, I shot a quick bit of footage in low light situations. First I recorded my Christmas tree and then my Christmas lights outside. I uploaded it to YouTube using the included FlipShare software.
@thekyleguy mentioned via Twitter that YouTube does not do well with HD footage, despite being newly HD and widescreen capable. He recommended blip.tv as a viable alternative.
I decided to compare them head to head, well, to head. I added Vimeo to the mix, as it is my sharing service of choice when publishing work for public display. My little less than one minute video was roughly 70 megs when copied right from the Flip.
Here are the three videos. Keep in mind I uploaded this without any changes at all. This is raw footage, compressed using the Flip’s internal H.264 compression and then the sites do with it what they please to display it. I also did not change the default embed code in any way, despite Vimeo’s delicious method to change the size, color, etc of embedded videos. I had to change all the embed code to the same size. Since YouTube’s embed code used the size I liked the best (560×345) I stuck with that all around. This post looked awful with three videos of all different sizes. In hindsight this should have been three posts.
The first thing to notice is that the blip.tv player borks my theme because of the width. It plays HD video in the native resolution of 1280×750. I could change that in the code relatively easily, but in keeping with a direct head to head to head comparison, to heck with my theme.
YouTube
Vimeo
So the Vimeo embed wasn’t HD. You have to go to the Vimeo site to watch it in HD. Odd.
A few weeks ago I read Tom Barrett’s Google Earth posts with interest. The idea of using voice inside Google Earth was intriguing, as it opened up new ways for my students in Spanish class to use the language.
So I tried Vocaroo. It didn’t work.
I emailed my principal and it was then forwarded to the district level for consideration. The district folks determined that when pressing Record, the request actually went to a different server. That server was blocked by our filters for being a known proxy hosting server. I accept the need to block that server, and wrote off Vocaroo.
However, I decided to email the Vocaroo folks and let them know. Originally they had me check to see if port 1935 was open in our district. It is. A few days later, I got an email from the Vocaroo folks saying..
Hi, just an update on this.
Vocaroo has now moved to a different server, so you should be able to
access it now (unless they deliberately block the vocaroo.com domain).
Wow! Vocaroo works like a charm now! Yay!
I asked whether this was directly related to my emails from earlier and they said:
Yes it was in response to your request – and thanks for reporting the
problem. The more people that can use it, the better
Wow again! I’m impressed. A very public thank you to Vocaroo for being willing to make this change so that my students and presumably many others can use the service.
Doug Johnson of the Blue Skunk Blog recently posted about the Nearest Book Meme.
I thought I’d play along.
The book is called 365 Daily Devotions for Righteous Man.
Page 56 is also Day 56, and the fifth sentence is, “And, few things in life provide more contentment than the knowledge that we are obeying God’s commandments.”
I didn’t plan this, but it happened to be the nearest book. If you want to play along, here are the rules:
Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence – either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don’t look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.
And like Doug, I want to say Thanks to Stephen Abrams of Stephen’s Lighthouse for this rather interesting (and easy) meme.
