Something that annoys me about YouTube is how bad videos usually look before you hit “play”. I just embedded a YouTube video into a techcrunch post and noticed again how terrible it looks.
I think they should have an option for people to upload a still image at the time of uploading the video, and the image can be shown instead of the blurry video stuff you usually see. Alternatively, they could allow the uploader to type in some text as a title, and show that.
I agree with you Mike, the YouTube previews are usually fuzzy and make blog posts look ugly. A trick I use is adding an intro in iMovie with a plain black background. That way the preview remains clean.
They just take the center frame and make that as the thumbnail image.
While be are talking about YouTube quirks, if you type something into the search and press tab (which you would expect to move the focus onto the search button) and then hit enter, the focus moves onto the YouTube logo and brings you to the homepage. This drives me nuts!
Mike, what you suggest is not feasible. What they do is when the video is uploaded, then encode the video into Flash and then use one of the frames to capture the thumbnail / image of the video. Providing the option for end users to upload an image during uploading the video can have 2 consequences 1) user can upload any unrelated image to the video 2) user has to capture a screenshot/image from the video fram themselves and use that to upload, which is too much work for end user.
The way it exists, is better for user uploading the video — though quality may not be optimal.
Put intermissions in your videos. I saw a tech news show that gets major traffic because they splice a hot girl into the show’s middle. Thus she is the show’s preview image.
Mike,
The still image you’re talking about is called a “poster frame”. At this late stage in the desktop video editing game, most widely available tools should have an option to “set the poster frame” to a particular frame in the movie, or to substitute a still image — this would occur before uploading. Alternatively, YouTube could allow the uploader to scroll through frames in the target upload movie and select the poster frame… the API calls are there. Just pure sloppiness on the GooTube side.
According to YouTube’s FAQ, the preferred upload format is MPEG-4, which has native features for poster frames.
BTW most recent consumer camcorders can export to MPEG-4, as well cell phone video cameras - 3GPP video isH.263 -> H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10)
Just my .02….
I just thought about this yesterday! I was uploading some videos to YouTube and MetaCafe and I saw 2 good things that MetaCafe dose and YouTube don’t:
1)MetaCafe lets you choose thumbnails (from your video), to your video preview.
2)What’s more important,MetaCafe warn you when you upload file that they don’t support. YouTube let me wait an hour for my file to upload and then told me that they not support SWF files. Grrrr!
Or they could place a still frame advertisement as the first frame. This would give them a great way of generating revenue as the ads would be placed in prominent places all over the web.
blip.tv lets you upload your own
Agreed, the homepage of YouTube is rarely enticing - the thumbnails are almost always bland. Whilst uploading an image might not be the best idea (due to the reasons above) perhaps being able to scroll through the image and select a frame would be a better, while not entirely perfect, alternative.
I am using a website called http://www.sevenload.com. Not only do they allow you to pick a thumbnail from the video but I also found the overall quality of the site much better than YouTube.
After uploading my first video on sheds to both YouTube and Google Video, I gave up on YouTube. The quality just wasn’t there. It didn’t take all that long to figure out the “poster frame” for GV. I was able to hit it in my subsequent 2 minute epics.
It’s getting pretty annoying the way people are taking advantage of Youtubes system for capturing picture previews of the video. They take the screencap from about the middle of the video. Youtubers that have figured this out are inserting quick flashes of pictures that have nothing to do with their video and that garner more clicks(I.E. top models).
http://www.sevenload.com looks nice but it’s in all German as soon as you click anywhere!
Needs translating.
Idea sounds nice, but as soon as someone will be allowed to customize the poster frame of the uploaded video, he probably might decide to use much attractive but unrelated image just to gain more attention.
I think there’s another solution possible. When automatically creating poster image, YouTube can shrink it using bilinear algorithm (twice, for example) — and the quality of image will grow because mpeg(jpeg) artifacts will become smaller. Because of shrinked image takes less space on the screen this free space can be used to add title and subtitle.
Another option might be best of all. Youtube divides video length to 4 (or 16) parts and creates series of corresponding keyframes — storyboard. Then these keyframe images are tiled on the poster frame. This presentation can become more effective than current one because user can view storyboard and know what to expect from video.
What do you think?
I totally agree with you on this. Half the time I’m not totally sure what I going to see. It would make sense to have a clear jpg or gif that showed what the video was going to be about.
Thanks
Charles Kirkland
http://www.shed-plan.com
Re: poster frame, there is good info here:
How To Set Up The Right Poster Frame In YouTube
http://www.squidoo.com/youtubeframe/
how does youtube pick the still image for each video anyways, do they just pick a random image from your vid?