I love Picasa, a free photo management tool, and Flickr, a great (also free) online photo sharing/storage service. Picasa, now owned by Google, does have its own photo sharing service and it is quite good. However, I give Flickr the nod because it has more professional features that I use and seems more mature in it’s development. So, if you’re like me, you want a way to integrate the capabilities of Picasa on your computer (it runs on Mac and PC) with your online Flickr account, there’s a solution. It’s a Picasa plugin called picasa2flickr.

If you watch the video above, you’ll see how to install and use it, but essentially it gives you another button allowing you to perform the uploading action on a given photo or photos. You will need to also have the free Flickr tool Flickr Uploader. Once Picasa and Flickr Uploader are installed, you can click on the picasa2flickr link and it will add it to the Picasa button along the bottom of the program’s screen. Now uploading photos to your Flickr account is as easy as finding them in Picasa and pushing a button.

A little over a year ago I posted Embed YouTube Video in PowerPoint Offline using various tools to allow the embedding of YouTube videos in PowerPoint presentations. In the mean time, YouTube has added a bazillion more videos, and some new tools have become available to make it much simpler to use that wonderful resource to enhance your presentations. If you didn’t click the link above to my previous post, I used a website (at Techcrunch.com) to download a YouTube video, and then converted the Flash video file to an mpeg file using Riva FLV Encoder. It wasn’t all that difficult a procedure, but it had it’s clunky moments.

Now, short of PowerPoint directly supporting the use of Flash video, which it still does not, there is now a much simpler way of accomplishing the YouTube embed. The basic difference from the previous method is that this approach is more streamlined. The download of the video is accomplished with a Firefox add-on, or plug-in (instead of a website), and the video is then converted to a Windows Media video file (instead of mpeg), which retains more of the original quality of the YouTube video. Converting it to Windows Media also allows the side benefit of the ability to further edit in Windows Movie Maker.

Starting with the add-on, called Video Download Helper, we take the approach of having the tool available wherever the media is, instead of having to go to YouTube, copy the URL of the video, and then paste that URL at another website. What Video Download Helper does is “discover” any videos that are associated with a given webpage. An icon will then animate in the toolbar of the Firefox web browser indicating that it has found one or more media files. Clicking the icon will reveal a drop-down menu showing the file(s) that are available. Selecting a file will begin the download. It will download the file with the .flv extension included, something the Techcrunch tool did not do.

Now with the Flash video on the computer, it is time to convert it to Windows Media format. A free, open-source tool called WinFF comes to the rescue, as previously the only way to accomplish the conversion with a free tool was using the VLC player/converter. Every time I have ever used VLC to convert to WMV it left a few seconds of what I’ll call “compression garbage” at the beginning of the video. With WinFF, that garbage is gone. WinFF is just a simple GUI interface on top of the FFMPEG program, a dreaded command line program, and not for the faint of heart. A few clicks in WinFF and your YouTube video is soon converting and ready for inserting into PowerPoint.

Watch the screencast Embed YouTube Video into PowerPoint.

In my previous post I referred to the latest Windows Movie Maker program for Windows Vista has issues with frame accuracy. Well, here I present to you a very graphic demonstration (a screencast) of that lack of accuracy. What you will see is how erratic the native Windows Vista Movie Maker program is. For that, and the other reasons mentioned previously, go download Windows Movie Maker 2.6 to get slightly less erratic behavior.

An even better idea would be to download another free Windows video editor called VideoSpin. This video editor is a scaled down version of their Pinnacle Studio editor. VideoSpin has the same general features as Movie Maker and it also adds a nice YouTube upload feature. I’ll have more to write (and screencast) about VideoSpin in the future. For now, enjoy the screencast.

This post finds me answering the question of what have I been up to lately. Well, I’m trying to find easy ways to edit and produce video for as close to zero expense as possible. So I find myself on the Mac and on the PC side of this MacBook Pro working with Windows Movie Maker for Vista and iMovie’08 for Mac. Now I’m going to jump straight to the ending and say that I don’t recommend you use either one of them, at least not for start to finish video editing projects.

What I will recommend that you do is go download the previous version of the editors and use them instead. So, if you use a Mac, go download iMovie HD. If you are using Windows XP, you’re OK, but make sure you have at least version 2.1. If you have Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, go download Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista. If you have Vista Home Basic, or Vista Enterprise/Business, it looks like you’re out of luck because version 2.6 seems to require that you have the original Vista Movie Maker program. Home Basic and Enterprise versions don’t come with Movie Maker so it looks like a non-starter.

Another caveat, the download page for Movie Maker 2.6 for Vista says to test if you can run the original version of Movie Maker. They say “If Movie Maker launches, you should not download version 2.6”. I have not discovered any incompatibilities with having both versions on my computer. As a matter of fact, I’m seeing that the original version of Movie Maker runs better once you install the old version. By better I mean that the original version has big problems with frame accuracy, in other words finding the exact point where one scene ends and the other begins. Still, Movie Maker 2.6 is more frame accurate.

Also, when you import video into the original Vista Movie maker, it does not detect scenes correctly. However, here is a truly weird situation. If I open a movie in 2.6 it does the scene detection correctly, and then if I open up the original Movie Maker with the same video all the scenes are now there as if it detected those scenes all along. Here’s a screencast of the phenomenon:

Expect more from me soon, regarding Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. Here’s a teaser for a large project I’m working on.

The world of video sharing websites is changing rapidly. YouTube and its competitors are trying to distinguish themselves by constantly improving their services, so we should see great progress in terms of quality of video and features that these sites offer. My recent quest has been to find the best options for hosted screencasts. The makers of my screencasting tool of choice, Camtasia, offer a (pay) service to host the videos at a site called screencast.com. Here you can host the higher quality, and higher resolution (larger), SWF files that really make screencasts look their best. You also can host those high quality screencasts on your own hosting service, provided you have that little extra know how to get them up and streaming. There is an SWF version of the screencast represented in the above photo available.

The latest version of Camtasia also gives the option of outputting a blog-friendly version of the screencast that works well for embedding into a blog post. However, if you want to give your screencasts a wider audience, you may want to consider YouTube or other video sharing services. Here are a few things you should know about sharing your screencasts online.

The Secret High-Quality YouTube Hack

This really isn’t a secret any more, but YouTube is experimenting with higher quality videos. YouTube announced that it would offer higher quality versions of video, one reason being so that they can accommodate the Apple iPhone and Apple TV, which don’t play Flash video. The video format that is used is a variant of MPEG-4 known as h.264. Adobe recently upgraded their Flash player to play h.264 video in addition to Flash video (FLV). The h.264 versions of the video will give the Apple TV users a more TV friendly experience because it is higher resolution.

To see the higher quality version videos on YouTube you need to add an extra little bit of text to the URL of a YouTube video. Whatever the URL is, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. If that doesn’t work, you can try &fmt=6. To see the screencast represented by the photo above at high quality resolution, go to:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg&fmt=18

Compare that with the low quality version that is located by using the traditional URL (without the &fmt=18):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg

The obvious benefit to the high quality version is that the text is much sharper. The downside is that it will take longer to download to a user’s machine (it’s roughly twice the size). You also lose a bit of the “instant seeking” ability. With a standard YouTube video (the Flash version) you can start watching at any point by moving the play head to the position that you wish. You won’t be able to do that with the h.264 version until it downloads entirely to your computer.

You can click on the images below to compare side-by-side screenshots.

Other Video Sharing Sites

I experimented superficially with some other video sharing sites, and I can recommend two that give good quality encoding of screencasts. One is Blip.tv, which is my personal favorite video sharing/TV channel service. Blip.tv’s selling point, besides the myriad of options to publish, cross-post, distribute, advertise, etc., is that they use the higher quality On2 codec for Flash video. I can also customize a player to match a given blog, and maximize the window to fit in the space that a given WordPress theme provides.

The other site that impressed me was Vimeo. This is one of the first sites to offer HD Flash video, and while I didn’t try to upload the video at HD resolutions, the video quality is quite good at the standard setting. You also can view the video full screen and while the artifacts of compression are more noticeable, you get an acceptable quality video to watch. Blip.tv has the full screen capability as well, but I couldn’t get it to work when I embedded the video in a blog post. Lots more testing yet to do, but so far some cool things out there to report. More to come.

Here is the Blip.tv version:

Here is the Vimeo version:

Install Flickr Photo Gallery Plugin in UMWBlogs from Andy Rush on Vimeo.

This one comes via the Tubetorial site (which has a definite "monitize it" theme). As the video demonstrates, there is now a Revver plugin for WordPress. What are the advantages of Revver over something like YouTube? Well, for one thing, you can make money from your videos. The second advantage is that the video quality is superior to what you’ll get with YouTube. The screencast in the above video looks great.

As I promised in my screencast on Embedding (live) YouTube Videos In PowerPoint, here is a video demonstrating how to download a video from YouTube, convert it, and insert it into a PowerPoint slide. I’ll be using my old friend Riva FLV Encoder to convert the downloaded FLV into an MPEG1 video file. This is a format that is compatible with the insert video function in PowerPoint. You cannot directly embed an FLV file in PowerPoint (maybe someday?), at least not easily.

It’s a little less than 10 minutes, and the main video is about an 8MB download. So without further delay, here is the screencast entitled Embed YouTube Video in PowerPoint Offline .

It’s the start of a new semester and that means that the senior seminars get under way. Those classes are designated “speaking intensive”, and so they will have a presentation component to them. One of the popular questions I get asked is how do I embed video in my presentation. Well, you certainly can insert a video that you have already on your hard drive, but with YouTube being such a popular resource, I thought I’d share a screencast about embedding YouTube videos in a PowerPoint 2007 slide. There is also a YouTube video for doing the same thing in PowerPoint 2000/2003. Keep in mind that these techniques require a live connection to the Internet, otherwise your slide will be blank.

UPDATE: People have been reporting that there is no “Custom” field any more that calls up the Movie URL dialog box. Well don’t worry about that. Just place the modified YouTube URL in the “Movie” field in the main “Properties” dialog window. I need to update the video to reflect that.

One further note is that a similar technique is used if you want to embed a Flash animation (a .swf file). Check out the Inserting Flash Movies Into PowerPoint screencast.

Just watch!

In honor of Microsoft Windows Vista being released today (and all the hype that goes along with it), I wanted to show everyone a feature that really works spectacularly well – the voice recognition system. I don’t see many places talking up this feature, and I DO have to give it further testing, but so far it really works!