Video Catching Up To Photos When It Comes To
Video Sharing, Video Storing
 For Robert Levitan, the revelation came after a
summer hiking trip on Mount Washington in New Hampshire
with his twin brother. During the five-day trip in 2004,
he used his digital Canon Elph camera to snap 80
pictures and 6 video clips. After the
trip, his brother asked him to e-mail copies of the
video.
"I said no, I'll have to make a DVD," Mr. Levitan
said. "The file sizes are too big to easily send via
e-mail."
That got him thinking: Why couldn't someone just
send video from a desktop or laptop
computer to other people's computers?
It is a question that an increasing number of
digital camera users may ask as they start using the
increasingly sophisticated video abilities of digital
cameras.
Luckily, consumers have an alternative to
burning DVDs or uploading personal
video to sharing sites like www.youtube.com or
www.metacafe.com. A range of new services and companies
are making it easier than ever to share digital
video from cameras or camcorders.
Outsourcing It to Video Storage and Sharing
Services
If you do not want people viewing video directly
from your computer, you might consider a fee-based
video sharing service like HomeMovie.
"We're positioning our services as video
sharing for grown-ups, not 'ego-casting,' where
people upload a two- to three-minute clip of themselves
lip-synching," said Lars Krumme, a co-founder of
HomeMovie.
HomeMovie's latest service, Afiniti 3.0, allows
consumers to send in tapes for digitizing,
upload digital files for high-quality
video sharing or connect their digital camera
or camcorder directly to their computer and
transfer new video or pictures. The service can
also be used to download video to iPods.
Users can have up to five hours of video content in
their online account free. Up to 10 hours is $3.99 a
month with no time limit for the clips — you can have
one-minute clips or two-hour clips.
When you share video using
HomeMovie (www.stashspace.com), the video clips
are uploaded from your computer to HomeMovie's
servers. Invited friends and family members, who are
given a password, can download video clips to
iPods, order DVD's or watch video
online — all free.
You can tag videos or scenes with
keywords, so that you can search for "vacation" video or
"birthday" scenes. HomeMovie also offers a service that
will encode a two-hour tape into digital files for $5.
An advantage of HomeMovie is that it provides
basic video editing abilities,
including combining video clips into a
longer movie, or the ability to remove unwanted scenes —
particularly helpful when working with shorter clips
from digital cameras.
However, there are no special transition tools, like
dissolves or fades; the scenes simply cut from one to
another. For other kinds of movie magic, you will need a
video editing software package.
Video Sharing by E-Mail
Many popular video sharing sites do
not allow you to share full-quality video,
because of bandwidth limitations. Instead, they provide
a compressed resolution and reduced-quality version of
your video, optimized for online viewing.
Pando, which Mr. Levitan helped found, takes a
different approach. It transmits video files (or any
files) from one computer to another using easily
downloadable peer-to-peer software that manages the file
transfers and communication between the computers (the
peers) in the background.
The whole process is wrapped into a simple,
e-mail-friendly format so users can send links and
initiate video transfer as easily as
attaching and sending a digital picture.
"On a personal level, I needed this product after
that camping trip," said Mr. Levitan, who was earlier a
founder of iVillage, a collection of Web sites bought by
NBC Universal this year for $600 million. "Normally
you'd attach pictures or videos to an e-mail, but e-mail
wasn't designed to handle sending very large files."
Pando's process is simple. Users register at
www.pando.com, and download and install a small software
program (available in a test version for both Mac and
PC). After that, users simply open up Pando, hit the
"send new" button, and select the files or folders they
want to send, along with a short description of the
package.
An e-mail message is sent to the recipients, who,
once she has installed the Pando software, can click on
a small attachment and start downloading the files. A
strength of Pando is the ability to send large files —
the service allows users to send up to a gigabyte at a
time, which is enough for hours of video.
Pando does not compress or transcode video
files, so there is no change in video
quality. In addition, Pando can be used with
any type of attachment — video files, digital pictures,
documents, PowerPoint files. Pando seems to have
answered a need, reporting more than 600,000 downloads
of its software in six months.
Becoming a Broadcaster
Alternatively, you can become your own broadcaster
with Pixpo. Pixpo allows consumers to maintain their
videos on their own computer and broadcast them to
selected friends or relatives.
"We allow users to create broadcasting channels that
can be made public or kept private," said Robert Cooper,
Pixpo's director of business. "Public ones are visible
to anyone via your broadcast home page, while private
ones can be viewed only by people you've e-mailed a link
to."
Pixpo, available in beta testing, turns your PC (and
in the future, your Mac) into a broadcasting center able
to stream video. The service is free
and has no limitations on the number of video clips or
users involved in sharing. Resolution
is optimized for Internet transmission, at 240 by 320
pixels, a compromise between speed and quality.
The advantage for viewing is that Pixpo
streams video over the Internet instead of
sending the actual video files, which would require the
receiver to have the right video software (known as a
video codec).
But since the files you are sharing remain on your
PC, you need to have an always-on connection and leave
your PC and Pixpo software running to provide
round-the-clock access to your video.
Setup is easy: go to www.pixpo.com, download the
software (currently a svelte 4.5 megabytes) and then
create your broadcast channel by selecting the files you
want to share, giving your channel a name and telling
friends about it.
Of course, if 100 people show up at the same time to
view your video, your computer connection probably will
not support the load. Pixpo can help by storing
highly requested video from your system in a cache, so
multiple copies can be served simultaneously.
By DAVID A. KELLY
Published: June 29, 2006
New York Times |