Searches for popular games or applications for instance show dozens, sometimes hundreds of short crap videos that claim to provide information on how to get those for free or at a bargain.

Even worse is that these video results appear on seemingly unrelated searches as well. A search for Google currently lists multiple videos about Assassins Creed 2 cracks and downloads on the search results page when sorted by upload date.

The spammers seem to use different accounts, probably automatically generated to upload the videos so that it becomes harder to ban them from the video portal.

Many use spammy descriptions with lots of unrelated keywords so that the videos are displayed on searches about those keywords as well.

The video descriptions usually contain a link from an url shortening service such as tinyurl that often lead to file uploading sites that pay their uploaders for downloaded files. They can however also lead to malicious sites. It is generally not recommended to follow the links that are posted on those video pages.

Youtube has a “Flag as Inappropriate” button on every video page that can be used to send the video to the review queue so that the staff will review it. That button is however only usable for logged in users. It is also not available on search result listings, only on single video pages.

How is your Youtube experience? Has it improved, remained the same or decreased recently?

Turn Off The Light is an extension for the Google Chrome web browser that can dim all elements on pages with videos but the video itself.

The extension will display a black light bulb in the Chrome address bar whenever it detects a video on a page. A click on that icon dims all elements on that page so that it becomes easier to concentrate on the video that is played on the page.

The opacity can be configured in the options of the extension. It is by default set to 80 and the color black. Both the percentage of the opacity and the color can be defined in the options. It is for instance possible to dim the video pages completely so that no element but the video is displayed during playback.

The only other option that is offered by Turn Off The Light is the setting to automatically dim the background on Youtube.

Turn Off The Light is compatible with many different video portals, we have not encountered any in our tests that did not work. The extension can be downloaded from Google’s official Google Chrome Extension gallery

The differences between Youtube feather optimized pages and the standard Youtube pages is quite noticeable. The video playback page of Youtube Feather for instance is fully transferred after downloading 52 Kilobytes of data compared to 391 Kilobytes that the standard pages require.

Youtube Feather achieves this partially by removing standard Youtube features such as posting comments, rating videos, viewing all comments or customizing the embedded player and most problematic of all that not all videos are supported by Youtube Feather.

Some users with the right hardware might on the other hand join the Youtube Feather beta if they are not using those additional features and like a faster Youtube experience. Youtube guests and users can join (and unjoin) the Youtube Feather beta at this Youtube page. (via Google Operating System)

The Youtube downloader comes with an interface that requires some explanation. VYoutube videos can be added to the software’s database by going to the Preview tab in the browser which will open the Youtube video portal in the application. Videos can be added by clicking on the Save In Database button on tab. Another possibility is to right-click on a video thumbnail and select the Download Video option but there is no way currently to add multiple Youtube videos directly.

Videos are added to the Your Video tab from where they can be added to playlists that work in the Youtube downloader. Alternative playlists can be created for the video player VLC.

Once the videos are in the Your Video pane they can be added in batch to a playlist, converted to another video format or to mp3 audio. That’s actually one of the biggest strengths of this Youtube downloader as it can virtually convert hundreds of videos at a time.

The program would be excellent if it would provide the option to add multiple videos directly to the program. The version of the Youtube Downloader which is currently 0.0.1 could mean that the software developer has plans to add that feature and additional ones to the software program. The program works under Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Read the following before you start complaining that it surely is like all the other video search engines out there: Microsoft Live Video Search has a very interesting preview features. If you hover the mouse over a video it will play a 30 second long preview of that video in the box that was occupied by the video thumbnail.

This is an excellent way of previewing many videos in short time without having to load them on separate pages. This is not only working on video search results pages but also on single video pages when hovering over related videos.

This instant preview feature speeds up the process of finding relevant videos. There are not really any other features worth meaning, Microsoft seems to have kept it as simplistic as possible.

There is however an easy way to enable Youtube high quality playback for all videos that have been uploaded and processed to deliver high and low quality versions. Always clicking on the “watch in high quality” link is the only option for users who do not have an account at the video portal.

That quickly becomes annoying if you watch dozens of videos a day. Users with an account can define the quality in the user’s profile. That’s the easiest and best way for users with a broadband connection who always want to watch Youtube videos in high quality.

The setting can be changed in the Playback Setup of My Account. The easiest way to reach the menu is by clicking on the Account link on top and selecting Playback Setup from the left menu once the Account interface shows up.

Checking the “I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it’s available” box will ensure that Youtube will always stream the high quality version of a video – if it exists – to the user as long as the user is logged in.

The search engine is indexing the contents of those websites and providing a search engine so that users can search all sites for multimedia content at once. The search results are therefor a combination of all multimedia portals. Results can be filtered by media type (video, audio, radio, games..) and sorted by factors like popularity, relevancy or rating.

Content that has been selected will be played in the main interface which uses independent blocks that can be moved around. It is for instance possible to search for additional videos while one is already playing. The multimedia content is simply embedded in the site which means that the basic controls of the site’s players is available.

One major nuisance of the multimedia search engine is that only four results are displayed per page which could mean some serious page flipping when searching for popular terms.

Registered users receive additional options like the ability to save or embed multimedia files or build a personal multimedia collection. The service is showing promise. It’s a little bit slow when it comes to displaying results to the user which quickly becomes annoying considering that only four results per page are displayed.

On the other hand: If you are looking for a way to search hundreds of sites for multimedia content you might want to give Video Crawler a try.

That seems to have been a major concern for the developers over at Dailymotion because they decided to develop and release a high quality option for users of their video portal. High quality videos look better than the default low definition videos but require less bandwidth and computing power than high definition videos. A compromise between quality and technical requirements so to speak.

The high quality option displays videos encoded with the H.264 codec which according to Dailymotion does not require additional bandwidth compared to the SD version of a video. It furthermore uses AAC 96 kbps audio encoding and a resolution of 512:384 and 30 frames per seconds.

Dailymotion created a website detailing the advantages of the high quality codec by displaying an standard definiton version next to the high quality version which gives a good impression of the quality differences.

The high quality version has to be enabled once by clicking on the Dailymotion Menu button and selecting the High Quality option.

The setting will be stored and the option will be enabled for all videos from then on. This is also the menu to change to other quality settings like high definition or back to the standard definition videos.

Videos are archived in categories like Tech, Food or People and can be played without having to register an account at the video portal. The website offers the usual “social web” features like rating videos, leaving comments, embedding videos and bookmarking them.

The videos on the main site have about the same resolution that Youtube provides but the player provides additional functionality like zooming in, slowing down or increasing the brightness of the video. Even more interesting than that is the so called Smart Player which opens the video and controls in fullscreen mode.

The resolution of the video is increased in that mode. It pretty much looks like a standalone video player in that mode. The functionality in that mode remains the same with the exception that it is a tad easier to browse related videos, add-ons and external links all without having to leave the page or stop the video from playing. Access to additional videos is given on that page as well which means it is entirely possible to stay in that mode and watch many videos.

Registered users can upload their own videos to the website. It is possible to edit video details while uploading the video which is another interesting feature.

The contents are extensive, lots of videos to chose from. Most videos have a playtime between 1-5 minutes but there are some that have a longer playing time. 5Min is a specialized video portal that provides enough videos to put it in a top spot of the Do It Yourself video portals. The player surpasses the players of most video portals by a mile and is reason enough to check the site out.

While most users are perfectly happy to watch the video clips online some prefer to download them to the computer. This has a few advantages like being able to watch them multiple times without using additional bandwidth or the ability to convert the videos into formats that can be burned to DVD or copied on mobile devices.

The number of video clip downloaders is nearly uncountable. There are dozens of browser plugins for various websites, the download managers and specific applications created for the purpose. They all cater to different audiences. Some users prefer to have the functionality build into their web browser, others prefer standalone applications that provide advanced features like downloading videos even if the browser is not active.

One popular application to download video clips from currently more than 70 video portals is xVideoServiceThief, a standalone application that uses a dropbox to catch the videos that it should download.

It’s easy to use the video clip downloader. The dropbox can be activated from withing the program interface and stays on top all the time. All that needs to be done is to move the video clip, either the url from the address bar or the link on the page, into the dropbox area. The download starts instantly

Video clips can also be added by pasting urls directly by clicking on the Add Video button in the program’s interface.

The downloads are automatically stored on the computer’s hard drive and by default converted into avi format. It is possible to pick another format like 3gp or mp3 instead or keep the downloaded files in their original format.

XVideoServiceThief is definitely not the only application that is providing that functionality but the program works without difficulties. It’s also worth mentioning that it is Open Source, available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh and comes as a portable version and installation in the Windows version.

The service currently requires a plugin to work properly but this need will fall away in the coming month according to Techcrunch when the Joost Standard service is introduced. The plugin is still needed for live and high definition broadcasts while all other shows are available for users without plugin as well. The Adobe Flash plugin will still be needed but this is pretty much a standard plugin on most computers nowadays.

Rumors are that Joost will stop development on the software client to concentrate fully on the Joost website which they are trying to establish as a video based social network type of website that comes with all the usual features and functions of those websites.

The move will surely see an increase in usage numbers but the real question is if it will be enough to keep the service alive. Taking it to the web means that it now has to compete with many already established video portals such as Youtube, Dailymotion or Hulu.

Speed is excellent currently but it remains to be seen how a massive rush of new users will affect the website. Many blogs will soon start to publish articles about the Open Beta of Vreel. Videos are definitely playing in a nice quality, much better than that of Youtube or similar video portals. Vreel offers the usual rating and comments system but it is quite obvious that not all functions are yet available.

A click on the community link for instance is just stating that this will come soon. What you can do right now is view, upload, comment and rate videos which is probably what most users that visit video sites do anyway.

Seems that the first outage hit the service right in the middle of my article. I cannot connect to it anymore and the pages give a page load error currently. Maybe just a server restart, it is a beta after all. Cannot do a screenshot of the interface right now obviously.

NewTeeVee has a list of countries that are blocked currently taken from the Wikipedia entry. If you do the math you notice that many countries are still missing on that list. If you sum it up you could say that access is blocked for most countries in Africa, Central and South America, Eastern Europe and Asia.

The first reason that was given to the public was that access was blocked due to a low concentration of users in those countries. According to official sources all blocked countries accounted for 10% of the Veoh user base. It probably makes sense from a business point of view to concentrate on markets that provide a large enough user base to be attractive to advertisers but the way the news was transmitted to the user base was rather unprofessional.

I suppose you could still try and access Veoh using a virtual private network connection like Hotspot Shield if you really wanted to.

Update on Vreel: (received via email)

The vreel servers were hosted in Houston’s DC1 datacenter, owned by the planet – which caught fire on saturday :)
Following a flurry of failed repairs, theplanet has finally agreed under immense pressure to move our servers to another datacenter.
We should be back up shortly, and are about ready to enter open beta.

The website lists a screenshot and the name of the video, the category that it appeared in at Youtube and the views that it received. The interesting information is probably the company or individual that asked for the takedown of the video. Lastly the date of the takedown and the time the video was available at Youtube is also mentioned.

The statistics page lists all the reasons why a video was taken down. Exactly 4413 videos have been taken down due to alleged copyright violations while the remaining 13424 videos have been taken down for other reasons including adult content and TOS violations.

The site makes it possible to take a look at all videos taken down by a specific company and it would probably make a nice research project to identify the reasons behind the takedowns.

Batch downloading from Youtube works on pages with more than one video on a page but not from the search results. The Download All or Download button becomes only active on selected pages. Say you want to download all videos by one publisher. To do so you open the publisher profile at Youtube and click on the Videos link that links to all videos. Only that page activates the download all button which was inactive on the profile page.

1-Click YouTube Batch Downloader is a great application for hardcore Youtube fans who also want to download a lot of videos to their computer. All videos are downloaded into the My Documents\My YouTube folder sorted by username.

Downloads continue even when browsing away from the page where the download was initiated. One thing that is missing is a stop button. It is not possible to stop or pause the downloads unless the application is closed completely.

Today should have been the day where Vreel goes live but unfortunately though this is not going to happen. The date has changed from May 6th to May 2008 and they have added a temporary forum and added several new questions to the FAQ.

And the information there make me doubt that the service will last long enough to become a serious competitor. In the forum thread “Why aren’t you launched yet” three answers are given why Vreel has not launched yet.

Firstly, our (previous) lead programmer liked to keep us guessing by vanishing for days at a time – making it near impossible to communicate any changes to him. I’m not sure if he’s even aware that we’ve switched to Vreel.net. We’re currently working with a highly regarded coder team, in order to avoid any further delays and disappointment.

So they switched from one coder to a coding team. It does look however make them look relatively amateurish.

Secondly, this thing has literally exploded since we started up – following the green light we got from DivX, we got a huge amount of attention – and a couple of servers based in the US just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Limelight Networks approached us with a contract with thousands of servers all over the world at 1.8TB/s+ connectivity – which we just couldn’t turn down. This does add on a small workload, and will slightly lengthen the testing process – but we shouldn’t be looking at any sort of dramatic time increase here.

That’s an understandable reason. Adding new servers, or a cluster of servers from another network should take a while.

And finally, we’re in the process of speaking with advertisement partners. As any videophile in the world can tell you, streaming HD video eats bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow – and rather than collapse under our own debt within a month, we’d prefer to find a solution which will allow us to run freely, without having to shut down most of our servers, or forcing a paid subscription.

This reason is the one I’m worried about most. They do not have a monetization concept yet which should be one of the first concerns when planning a high definition video portal. The Divx creators were not able to monetize their portal properly and decided to shut it down because of bandwidth and maintenance costs. What makes you think they will succeed where a company with huge ties in the Industry could not ?

The first thing that I noticed about Mooflair was its excellent design and responsiveness. I had some troubles finding the video search option, it’s a bit hidden under the RSS menu. Mooflair does not offer a full video search yet which is rather unfortunate. It provides access to all video portal RSS feeds which means to several dozen videos in certain categories like Video Games, Music and HD.

Local videos can be played as well. The ability to download videos is a nice feature but more or less a default feature in every video player of that kind. Mooflair does offer enough videos so that it does not get boring to fast but it is kept back by the lack of a full site search.

Another excellent feature is the ability to add videos to the playlist which can be filled with videos from all supported video portals. Those playlists can be saved and played at a later time. It is even possible to mix local and online videos into one playlist. Mooflair has everything it takes to become an excellent Adobe Air application, the only missing piece is the full video search on all portals.

The domain name was quickly switched from Divxit to Vreel and the logo was exchanged as well. A disclaimer at Vreel is stating that Vreel has no official affiliation with the DivX corperation. They surely have come to an agreement because Vreel is actively linking to and thanking Divx for their cooperation. A newly added Questions and Answers section gives us additional details about the new video portal.

Vreel will not take over the videos that have been posted at the former Stage6 video portal and start from scratch on launch date which has been delayed until May 6th. The service will be free just like the service at Stage6 was. Users will be able to view videos without an account. Registered users will be able to upload videos with a size of up to 800 Megabytes. The first days will function as a stress test of the server infrastructure.

There is no word on the piracy issue yet but it is very likely that Vreel will run into similar problems as Stage6.

Bandwidth and server costs accumulated to more than a million Dollars each month. As I said earlier the service was highly popular because of the great video quality which exceeded that of most other portals.

Tulluis informed me just a minute ago that a Stage 6 Clone was announced that would open its gate on April 29th. The homepage of the new service is Divxit and there is unfortunately not a lot to discover right now. Servers and GUI seem to be online already and the Divxit Core converter nears completion which seems to be the last step before the portal goes live.

It would be really nice to see a comeback of Stage 6. A service like that needs either a very potent company in the background or find a way to monetize the website properly so that it does not have to be closed soon after release. Monetization of video portals is not easy because companies know that the click through rates are horrible.

That was just one feature of Miro. The main one in my opinion is the ability to download videos from various sources including Bittorrent, video portals like Youtube, URLs and Video RSS feeds with subscription possibilities. So called Search Channels can be created. Say you like football and regularly check Youtube for new football videos. You could create a search channel which gets automatically updated when new videos get published.

A new version was released today which is a major step for the Miro team. Miro should run a lot smoother in this version especially because of the update to XULRunner 1.9 which should bring performance and memory improvements to the Windows and Linux clients. Check out the release notes if you are interested in a detailed list of changes.