Arlington County is a YouTube Partner!

Well, it all seems kinda shady like a back room deal or something, but I got an email from tha Virginia State Government person today telling me that Arlington County's YouTube account had been upgraded to "Partner" status. I didn't even have do anything since my previous posting where I said I would apply - I guess she just emailed her contact at YouTube and got it done for me. That's great, but at the same time it seems weird that it works that way.

So, now I'm working to design the banner and logos and such that I can add to our page - there's a new section on the Account Management page for "Branding Options." Hopefully I can get something thrown together and put up there soon. The other awesome benefit (in addition to that auto-play that started this whole thing, of course) of being a partner is an increase in the max upload. As a partner, I'm still limited to 1044 MB per video, but there isn't a time restriction.

Joining the iPod club

Hooha! I got an iPod for my birthday! I was hinting, but it was still a surprise. It's a green 3rd generation 8 Gig iPod Nano. The third gen nanos have video, too!

I've already gotten into iTunes and pulled in all my ripped CDs. I also subscribed to a bunch of podcasts (some favorites that I was simply pulling off YouTube, some I had downloaded directly from their host websites).

My sister got me an iTunes gift card, too, so I was able to buy some songs I found out about from Pandora (there's only one MC Chris song on iTunes!! Lame!) I also pulled in two Mitch Hedberg Comedy Central tv specials. I've yet to get my own videos on there - that's something I'd like to do, and I'll updates here as I figure that out.

But, overall, I'm totally digging my iPod. I'm finding iTunes and syncing up my iPod to be an easier process then I thought it would be, and I have no complaints about the click-wheel or using the iPod interface (two things I've heard other people complain about). I am definitely seeing how one could get lured into the "listen to my iPod everywhere all the time" thing - it's awesome having so much music so easily available in such high quality in such a small package. I can't believe I actually worked out in the garden last summer with a Sony DiscMan clipped onto my belt...

YouTube Partners

So, I've found out a lot more about the whole YouTube Partners thing. Apparently getting the extra features a partnership can provide can be as simple as applying to be a partner! This doesn't seem to be heavily advertised by YouTube, but there are instructions and loads of YouTube video bloggers talking about it, like this guy.

I think Arlington County should qualify - I've uploaded about 100 videos and we generate original content on a regular basis that is viewed by thousands (well, cumulatively maybe). I'll go through the application and we'll see! Heck, my personal YouTube account gets hits in the thousands, too, so maybe I'll see if I can be a partner on that side, too...

The YouTube "in crowd"

I found out that the state (er, Commonwealth) of Virginia signed up and has started posting videos.

They don't exactly have the whole thing figured out yet it seems, as some of their videos are unsynched and aren't quite YouTube "friendly," but whatever. The thing that really struck me was how when you go to their channel page, the main video plays automatically. Funny thing is, I was just talking to John Lisle, the PIO of Arlington's Police Department about this exact thing - the ACPD has a YouTube page of their own and John was asking me about how to make the video on the channel page play automatically (like the VA state channel). I didn't think it was possible, but now that I saw the VA state page doing it, I knew there was something to what John had said.

As any good internet researcher does, I turned to Google. I typed in "auto-play video on youtube channel page." This got me some good hits and basically what I learned is this: YouTube will work with celebrities, large companies, politicians and any other big powerful organization and give them a "super" page that can have its own fancy background, an auto-play video, and a couple other features. It's not something mentioned on YouTube's pages, in any of the account settings, or even in their help. Interesting....

So, I sent a friendly message to the VA state folks (linky on their channel page, of course). I offered a suggestion about encoding their video to help with the synch issue and inquired about the auto-play video... all in the interest of inter-governmental partnerships, etc...

I got a reply back, and long story short it is indeed a big Google who-you-know thing - the whole VA YouTube thing came out of a meeting between Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Governor Tim Kaine. Within two days, the VA YouTube page launched.

Video update

I've been doing lots with YouTube and such lately, so here's an update: a while ago I realized it was clunky and messy to embed YouTube videos right on ericbolstridge.com. So, I simply put a link to my my YouTube account and another link to my Arlington County videos.

We've been cranking out content at work, so eventually the Arlington County YouTube account page was getting cluttered, and it was way too hard to find videos or expect anyone to see the "good stuff" with 70 or 80 videos spread over 6 pages... So, I dug into YouTube a bit, figured out Playlists, and set up a bunch to keep things organized. Now, I point people here at work (and on ericbolstridge.com) to the Arlington County Playlist page instead. Ooh, organization! How nice!

EricBolstridge.com

I now have 19 videos up on my website, thanks to YouTube. The quality is satisfactory, I think, so I don't think I'm going to bother with uploading and embedding Quicktime videos hosted on my site. Pretty sweet. The website is still fairly ugly, just barely past acceptable, but at least all the links work now, even though most lead to an "under construction" page. Perhaps in the near future I will find some excuse to spend a week with Dreamweaver to create a page that is actually good looking.

Converting video for YouTube: SOLVED

I figured it out! A little more research, a little more testing, and I've discovered the best codec for creating video for YouTube. A Quicktime H.263 for a faster output from my AVID (slower upload to YouTube), and H.264 for a slower output from my AVID (but a faaster upload to YouTube). H.264 is apparently much improved over the previous, but I see no difference in quality once it's converted over to teh flash of YouTube. Check out some of my YouTube videos! I have two accounts - one for work and one for my own stuff.

YouTube attempt

Well, I uploaded a video to YouTube using the settings they recommend and it turned out kinda crappy and the audio is all out of sync. I checked out a couple forums and such and seems there's lots of theories and explanations for both problems. In general, motion and "video information" are not handled well by the conversion to Flash (the format that YouTube presents videos in). Anyway, as another step in learning a bit about YouTube, here's an attempt at posting an embedded YouTube video:



Cool. In other news, I took a DreamWeaver 2004 class a year or so ago, but I've forgotten a lot of it. Next on my list is going to be to buy my domain name and see about getting a website up. I should be able to figure out how to get some hi-res videos on the internet for all to see that way.