The Basement Blog

With 2006 having been the “Year of YouTube“, I thought it’d be kind of cool to look at one of those other video hosting sites available. Since I’ve been part of YouTube for a while, I know at least the basics of the type of web tool. So I looked at the list of Web 2.0 sites available for video hosting and picked the site with the funniest name; Viddler.com. Yes, I had a good chuckle over that, perhaps it’s because I watched too much Batman as a child. Anyways, because I had never even heard of this site before, I signed up for the free service and got to work exploring the site.

Viddler is an online video-hosting site. You can use it to upload your own video files, or record a file straight from your recording device to the website. Your file is then stored on the site and available for comments and viewing by other members (that is, depending on whether or not you set your video to “Public” or “Private” use). The site also promises to give your video embedding and URL abilities, as well as enhancement features. People use this site (and sites like it) for homemade video projects such as video blogging and well, whatever they record that they feel like sharing with the world.

Now, when a site is described to me as “a fresh, creative web application that lets you upload, enhance and share digital video quickly and easily inside your web browser” (www.go2web20.net) I’m expecting something pretty cool, with a neat gadget or two that will make my videos look like it took twice as much effort to make it than it really did. What I got, didn’t do half of that - in fact it did none of that. I uploaded 2 videos just to make sure. One was an old video I had lying around on my computer and another was recorded straight off of my webcam. The upload and recording process didn’t take a long time which I was impressed with, but the quality of the video wasn’t very good. Once the upload was finished, just rewatching the file was a hassle because the player is absolutely mind boggling. Sometimes the Play button works, other times it disappears. Sometimes the video won’t rewind, other times it does it all by itself. Then I tried searching for these “enhancing” features and I was completely lost because I found nothing even remotely like that. There wasn’t even a button to stop the video play. I was pretty frustrated at this point having realized that I’d just lost 12 minutes of my life to the Viddler. At least, I had a movie to put on the blog to demonstrate with…or at least, that would have been *nice*. There were no HTMLs or URLs or anything available, I even went to the “Help” section to see if I was missing something obvious and after following their steps I still couldn’t find out how to share the video. The Help section told me to click “Share” on the videos timeline, but when I did…nothing. I ultimately decided to just put a link to the page on here for you because in the end I was just getting really confused and frustrated.

I searched the website for any other cool things that maybe could make me feel better better about the whole thing. I watched some other people’s video’s and a lot of it was kind of junky (although I don’t really know what I was expecting to find, it’s video-hosting not television). One thing that bothered me was the commenting system on Viddler. Rather than commenting the whole video, you comment certain parts of the video that appear on the timeline. A comment leaves these white dots on the timeline that you have to click to show the comment while the video is playing. It’s a very distracting and annoying concept, I put two comments on my video so you can see for yourself.

In the end, Viddler is good if you want a very very very simple video hosting site without a lot of expectations and a small viewing base. I suppose that video blogging might work okay for this site if you have a very good quality camera, but like I said; you’ll have a smaller viewing base and the quality of the video itself will have to stay simple. Ultimately I would definitely recommend YouTube.com over this any day. Save yourself the trouble and go with something that you know works.

My 15 Seconds Of Viddler-ness (okay, so it’s not winning any Oscars anytime soon)
(I think I’m going to take it down within a week or so before people actually start watching and commenting my 15 seconds of negativity…)

 .Michelle.