16 October 2007

A home for my GIMP screencasts: Romanian video sharing sites

Lately, I was in a GIMP screencasts creation frenzy (with ups and downs, struggles and achievements), the next step is to publish them somewhere.
It may be OK to put a few movies on your website, but when you have multiple 20MB files to host, you think twice (maybe three time if the site peaked at around 10.000 visitors a day recently with the help of a social bookmarking service) so the obvious solution is to use a video sharing site, with a compromise on video quality and file formats (Flash).

Of course, you have to use YouTube, that is the place where the most users will look for videos, but I think I identified a very good niche: Romanian video sharing sites, my co-nationals, with the most used ones being Trilulilu and Neogen (Trilulilu seems more popular but Neogen worked better for me - more about that later). Those sites are extremely poor in tutorials, FOSS stuff, GIMP or Inkscape stuff, they look like a virgin land for such type of content so I can get the first mover advantage.

[flash upload forms]But now to the ugly part: those sites are defective by design, they have the upload forms made with Flash (the upload pages, like other parts of the site are identical to the last word with each other, from what I understand Neogen shamelessly copied Trilulilu) but even worse, the Flash uploader from Trilulilu does not work under Linux, it report upload done but nothing happens (the one from Neogen is bad, but not that bad).

I did an effort, uploaded content to both, and indeed, on Trilulilu you get more eyeballs but the site is the worse from a Linux user point of view.

A conclusion? Recently Google started localized versions of YouTube for some language, when they will get a Romanian version those bad sites will get a much needed kick in the pants (still, they will survive, as the sites are a haven for stolen content copyright infringement porn questionable content - being outside of the RIAA/MPAA/whatever radar).

2 comments:

  1. Hey, I don't know if you know this, but new Flash player (on the Adobe labs) has gotten support for some great codecs like x264 and MPEG4 and such, from what I read, YouTube is coding every newly posted video to one of these and will be recoding their entire video archive in time so new Flash plugin users should get more quality by default.

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  2. But the quality still will be worse compared with the original: it transcode and resize the video (and on top of that, it is still patented to hell and not viewable with Free software).

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