video-sharing

How to share quick videos on Facebook and Twitter

Tout is an awesome 15-second video service that allows you to share moments, not movies.

By getting to the important part of your message (the 15 seconds), the video file is small enough to upload quickly to Tout's servers for sharing. The wide range of ways you can access its service makes it fun and easy to use, especially if you want a break from "wall" posts and 140-character tweets.This service can be used with: Webcams, file uploads, Android, and iOS. This How To will mainly focus on the mobile version of Tout.

Step 1: Create … Read more

Army launches video-sharing site for the military

People serving in the U.S. military now have their own Web site where they can upload, share, and watch videos.

Announced yesterday, the new MilTube site has been set up as a safer, more secure alternative to YouTube, with content protected behind firewalls. As such, it's designed to serve the interests of military personnel who want to share videos but also satisfy the concerns of the Department of Defense (DOD), which has never been comfortable with access to commercial social network and sharing sites.

"Video is an extremely powerful tool for storytelling and sharing information among personnel,&… Read more

YouTube cancels RealTime social video sharing

YouTube has canceled an experimental feature called RealTime, which brought an as-it-happens social aspect to Google's video-sharing site.

The move was announced early Monday on a YouTube help forum page:

We've seen some of you wondering what occurred to the Realtime Toolbar. The Realtime Toolbar was recently retired and is no longer an available feature on YouTube.

We were excited to release and experiment with Realtime and it has inspired us for new features on YouTube in the future. We look forward to introducing many new features in the coming months and are sharing them with you all. … Read more

Viacom, Google air dirty laundry in court docs

Court filings released on Thursday in the bitter $1 billion copyright fight between Viacom and Google's YouTube show just how far apart the companies remain, as the 3-year-old case winds through federal court.

Viacom, in 108 pages of court documents, portrays YouTube's founders as reckless copyright violators who were far more concerned with increasing traffic to their site than obeying the law. Even executives at Google, which acquired YouTube for $1.7 billion in October 2006, questioned the ethics of building a site through questionable copyright practices, according to the Viacom filings.

But in the 100-page document filed … Read more

Video site Dailymotion gets a pair of iPhone apps

Dailymotion was one of the first video providers to come out with support for the iPhone back in mid-2007 through the built-in Safari browser. Earlier this year the company also revamped all of its videos to support HTML5 video tags, a Web standard that the latest version of mobile Safari can play without the need for any special plug-ins like Adobe's Flash.

Apparently that wasn't enough though, because late Sunday the company released its own application that offers a handful of additional features for users with an iPhone or iPod Touch who want a native app instead of … Read more

Photoshop.com adds video hosting, group albums

Photoshop.com may be Flash-y and Air-y with photo-editing capabilities, but it surprisingly still seems to lag sites like Flickr and Facebook when it comes to various sharing features. For instance, only this week has Adobe launched video-hosting and group album capabilities (available for free accounts as well as paid), long available from its competitors.

There are some done-it-better aspects, however. For example, Adobe allows for larger videos: a maximum of 2GB vs. Flickr's 150GB/90 seconds. Of course, the more large videos you upload the closer it will push you to the 2GB storage maximum of a free … Read more

Memeo makes sharing easy

In the wide world of photo-sharing tools, Memeo Share makes a strong effort to retain your focus with online backups, support for full-resolution photos and videos, social networking features, and a revamped interface.

The basics should be familiar to many users. Once installed, Memeo starts with a user-friendly design: big buttons delineate tasks, your profile and friends are on the left sidebar, Activity and Sharing Circles are in the central pane, and the members of the current circle you're sharing with are on the right. The Sharing Circle is the big concept behind Memeo Share. It lets people create … Read more

An expert's guide to YouTube

In the past, we've done Newbie's Guides for certain services, but we wanted to switch things up and really dig into a product's advanced features.

Video-sharing site YouTube is the perfect service to start with because it's massively popular and incredibly simple to use, but also has a few powerful features that are tucked away. This guide is to help you learn how to use some of these advanced features and to serve as a simple reference page.

For the sake of simplicity, we're only covering searching, viewing, and sharing. We've skipped uploading since it's pretty straightforward and made simple with the service's recently launched multifile uploader. We're also not including any third-party downloading tools because that is against YouTube's terms of use and is already an official first-party feature on some content.

Searching

Using YouTube's search tool: YouTube's search engine works a lot like Google's. In fact, it uses the same search operators to let you tweak your results. Here are some worth remembering the next time you're looking for a video:

• Limit to words in the title. Putting "allintitle:" in front of your search keeps YouTube's results limited to those videos with the matching words in the title. This is great if you want to keep it from searching through descriptions or tags. Not so useful if the video you're looking for has a misspelled or misleading title.

• Exclude a term. Add a "-" then the word you want to exclude will keep it out of the results. So if you're searching for explosions but don't want to see videos with diet Coke or Mentos, you'd type in "Explosion -diet -coke -mentos." Be sure to add the "-" in front of every word you don't want.

• Play the wildcard. If you're too lazy to type a word, or think that YouTube will figure out the words you're leaving out, you can just put in an asterisk in place of that word. In practice, this means that searching for something like "Fallout: Broken Steel" you could just type "Fallout * Steel" and have it guess the word in the middle.

If you can't remember these off the top of your head you can find them in YouTube's advanced search box, which shows up as an option in the results of any completed search. It's also worth going there if you want to filter how long the videos in the results should be. This is a great way to find long-form content that's 20 minutes or more.

Search and browse with your eyes. If titles and thumbnails are not enough, you can explore additional, related video clusters by using YouTube's warp feature. This is a feature that can still be found on some videos, but YouTube has since relegated it to its TestTube section. That doesn't mean you can't use it on any old video though. Simply inserting "warp.swf" in the URL instead of the word "watch" will send you into full-screen "warp speed" mode. To read more about how to use this feature check out our coverage of it.

Third-party search tools There are a handful of third-party YouTube search engines and tools that add a little bit of utility on top of YouTube's search. Here are some of our favorites:… Read more

(Some) YouTube videos get download option

My CNET News colleague Charles Cooper's kvetching about YouTube not offering a download option for political videos seems to be answered. Such an option now appears right underneath the player on certain videos, including President-elect Barack Obama's weekly addresses.

While users have long been able to grab YouTube clips both with Flash rippers and H.264 stream downloaders, this would be the first time such an option has appeared on the site as an official offering. The new option gives users a full-quality H.264 file--the very same copy that's sent out to YouTube-capable set top boxes … Read more