When opting for The Web in Movie Maker
2, I have 2 choices of video hosting providers... Neptune for file
downloads and mydeo for streaming. Your choices will vary depending on the
country you live in. You might have both, one of them, or none. I'm not
aware of anyone having a service other than these.
This newsletter is about
mydeo, the streaming service choice. To get
started, here's a chart that shows the 9 steps from deciding to save your
movie to the web to viewing it as it streams from a mydeo
server.
What's the difference between a file downloading
service like Neptune and a streaming one like mydeo?
-
A file download service
like neptune sends a copy of the video to the viewer's hard drive as a
temporary internet file... as long as it remains there, any follow-up
viewings on that computer are from the already downloaded file. It's
quicker and easier to play it over and over, and easy to copy or view
offline.
Earlier this year mydeo significantly
reduced the price of their service. Unlike many free hosting services
that convert uploaded files to lower
quality and smother it with commercials, mydeo streams
what you upload, leaving any commercials for you to add
either in the video or on your website.
The chart above shows the steps to go
from a Movie Maker 2 project to the playing of the streaming video. Photo
Story 3 doesn't have such a build in menu option, but it's just as easy to
take a saved story from your hard drive and upload it to your account
at mydeo.... and viewing a story at high definition quality
is fantastic!!! We'll take a look at both.
... before getting
into them
further, a few notes...
Notes...
Vista Corner... I've been
using GoToMeeting software to conduct training and support
sessions, showing users things on their systems by remote control. A few days
ago I took a test drive of my Vista system from my XP laptop, and it
worked great, letting me make a DVD project and take screen snapshots... without
leaving my XP computer.
Seven come Eleven... a
day after upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 on
my laptop, I upgraded Windows Media Player to version
11. Both installed easily and work well, making it harder to check
into why some Movie Maker users are experiencing crashing after
installing IE7. I don't have any good clues yet.
Europe 301 - I spun off a 2-3/4
minute commercial video for the B&B we stayed at in Florence.
The video is on the mydeo service...
I
received an early birthday present... a 500 GB external USB2 hard drive,
one of those neat Western Digital My Books. It's our 3rd My Book and they
all work great. The vacation footage and pictures are going to it
now. With 20 hours of video and 9,200 pictures, my approach to sorting and
making them easily usable to movie projects is:
-
use MM2
on my laptop to capture the tapes to the new external
drive as DV-AVI files, in the background as I write this newsletter and
do other stuff... moderate routine work doesn't result in dropped frames. I'm
using the option to automatically rewind and capture the whole tape to one big
file. If I were to lose the file on the drive, I could recapture it. The
tape is the backup to the file and vice-versa.
-
import
the source files (video and pictures) into MM1
and organize the clips into collections, making separate collection
database files for each of the major places we visited - Alps, Rome, Florence,
Venice, etc.
-
use MM2
to make movie projects, importing the collections as needed to get
the projects started. Zero the MM2 collection file out between projects.
The MM1 collection database files are named Rome.col, Venice.col,
etc... MM2 imports MM1 collections with those user friendly names
without blinking an eye.
.... back to the main
topic...
Movies
If you opt for mydeo during the
saving process, you can opt for any of the quality profile settings that
Movie Maker provides.
To help you target today's
typical broadband user, mydeo has a downloadable custom
profile for Movie Maker that you can add to
your folder of custom profiles. It's settings include 320x240 (428x240 if
widescreen), 29.97 fps, 268 kbps video, 63 kbps stereo audio.
After the movie is uploaded, you can
log into your mydeo account and copy/paste one or more of the 3 html code
options they provide:
-
a direct link to your video...
which opens it in your Windows Media Player
-
a link to a pop-up window... which
uses java code to open the popup and html code to play the video in it... this
method doesn't work for me
-
an embedded
player
I made a sample
website page with the code for each option in it, all pointing to the
same video. Here's the link to the page:
Stories
Streaming photo stories are great,
from lower quality to standard DVD quality and all the way up to those
that align with high-definition... and they all use considerably less
bandwidth than movies.
There isn't the option built into Photo Story to interface
directly with the online service. Save the story to your hard drive, use your
browser to open the mydeo website, log in and upload. The smaller file sizes for
stories make them quicker to upload than movies.
Sample Stories at mydeo
Here are 4 links to the same story, but saved with 4
different quality profiles... to help you calibrate your connection to the
mydeo server. See how high you can go before the playing isn't
smooth.
Sorry for the first 20 seconds of audio... it was a mistake
putting the noise of a waterfall into the video without showing you once what
was making the noise. It's easily taken to be audio noise/static...
At home I can get through the first 3 smoothly, but it starts
hesitating at spots on the 1920x1080
At Barnes & Noble, the first 2 are fine... the 3rd one
turns into a slide show at about the 2/3 point... the last one stops at a frame
about the 2/3 point and shows the picture all the rest of the way. The
audio plays fine and all the way through for each.
Different internet connections from mydeo to you give you
different results. Each of them play fine on my laptop when the story file
is on my hard drive.
Conclusions and Closing
The mydeo streaming service is easy
to use and plays movies well... and plays stories even better. I
was very pleasantly surprised to roll out a few links to the high
definition story files I used for this issue and get feedback that
they played smoothly. My audio of a waterfall was the only issue
reported, which wasn't an issue when I told them what it was.
Thanks to Cary Marsh, the CEO and
Founder of mydeo, for helping me get setup for the testing that went into this
issue.
Notice that I didn't say anything
about the cost of the service... when I first wrote about mydeo I
emphasized cost considerations to help users
avoid being surprised by the bills. The prices today are much lower
and very reasonable, but I say that understanding that the word
'reasonable' varies with the individual. Many or most users on
newsgroups and forums are looking for the best free service...
for those the mydeo service can never be reasonable enough. The same goes
for the neptune file download service.
A quality service free of mass
marketing is worth paying for.
Have a great week...
PapaJohn
