Google Video Player

I am beginning to use videos more in my blogs and on websites I use - I have been telling myself for years that this is important and that I should be giving a video blog regularly - it is a much better way to show people and places for travel and lifestyle.

I have experimented with many systems, usually I use YouTube, but there are limits to length and size for a video. Interestingly although Google own YouTube they offer a more powerful tool with their first offering, Google Video. The big advantage with this is that it is that you can start playing from anywhere in the clip, but it doesn’t appear to be streaming.

Google Video uses an advanced form of progressive download which means that no matter your bandwidth you’ll be able to watch the video (it may take a while to download enough of the clip if your connection is slow). You can jump anywhere in the clip even if it has not downloaded that part yet and watch from that moment in time even if you do not have enough bandwidth for a real-time stream. It is the best of all worlds.

Recently I was a judge at a wine-tasting for Languedoc wines - I had to wade through 119 different wines and then have a twelve course lunch…

…I ended up with over a gigabyte of video which I could not load to YouTube, but Google Video took it calmly.