As you probably know, we’ve built a portal for all things video at SXSW this year. We hope to see everyone sharing their experiences at SXSW through this site, but I thought I’d take a second to explain how to use SXSWVideos.com.
SXSWVideos.com was built using our public API. No hacks! You could build this very same thing if you wanted to for your event. If you ask nicely, in the comments area, I bet I’d even help you with it.
Recording, uploading, or even importing your video through SXSWVideos.com is probably a fairly easy procedure, but since you’re already used to using Viddler.com - you may want to take advantage of things like our bulk uploader and not want to use SXSWVideos.com. That’s fair, here’s how you do that.
SXSWVideos leverages tags to feeds its various pages. The general tag of sxsw will put videos on the front page. However, each category on the site has its own tag like sxswintroduction, sxswmetoday, and sxswpanel. If you uploading a video to Viddler.com you can easily categorize that video on SXSWVideos.com by adding both sxsw, and sxswCATEGORY to the video. Be sure the tag isn’t plural!
Pretty simple, right?
If you have any questions about how to use the site itself, or how you can help us get video there, don’t be afraid to ask. We weren’t afraid to ask Chris Masto to join us at SXSW this year to help us shoot some video, here is his introduction.
One of the most under-utilized features of Viddler, or any social sharing site, is use of meta data. To be more specific, tags. Often tags are not even used! And, when they are used they are not being used well enough to really promote the content properly.
So, lets go through proper tagging techniques and the benefits of taking an extra few moments to make sure your videos are tagged properly.
Three simple questions
In order to make best use of tags, all you need to ask yourself is three simple questions. By answering these questions, by using tags, you can be sure that you and everyone else will be able to find your videos quickly and easily.
In fact, asking these three questions can expose your videos to people who may not even be looking for your video specifically. We’ll look into this more in a minute.
Who?
What?
Where?
Three simple questions that can be used on pretty much every single video that you upload to Viddler. Who is in the video? What is in the video or what does it regard? Where was the video shot? Each of these questions may have multiple answers or can be answered in little or great detail.
Lets look at an example video, and pick apart its tags to see how they are best utilized. The Riddler - by: Bryan is a video I shot back in 2003 of my friend Bryan doing the “riddler walk”. I’ve added the following tags, to answer the above questions.
This makes it very easy for me to find the video again. It also would make it easy for anyone to find the video under the following circumstances: anyone looking for: Bryan Jackson, videos taken in Montdale or just Pennsylvania, videos taken on a golf course, impersonations, or the riddler. So essentially I’m exposing my video to many more people by adding the proper tagging.
Proper timed tags
When should you use timed tags? Obviously you can use timed tags as often as you’d like, but to really add value you should add timed tags anytime the three questions answers change. When a new who, what, or where changes in the video - you should put a tag on the timeline. This makes it much easier for people to find the portions of your video they are looking for.
So the next time you’re wondering how best to tag your video - perhaps you should ask yourself the three simple questions.
Video blogging has really taken off and we want to accommodate any of you out there that wish to have a video blog, but would like to use Viddler’s superior flash player. The following is a video overview and demo followed by links to resources to help you pull this off.
Overview video and demo
The following instructions are found in the video, so if you don’t have time to read all of this information - simple watch the overview video and demo.
Simple instructions
You will need the following in order to utilize Viddler’s player and its features while also having enclosures in your feed.
We’re looking forward to creating similar demo videos for other blogging platforms besides WordPress, such as Movable Type, in the near future. If you are not a WordPress user and have gotten this to work on your site please write us to let us know how you did it. We’d be glad to include your tips in our next demo.
Viddler allows a larger file size than most of its competitors! You should take advantage of this by offering your audience the highest resolution playback possible. You may upload as much video as you’d like with a limit of 500Mb per video uploaded. If you are distributing a 50MB file to your current audience you should still continue to do so for playback on devices like the iPod. However, if you’d like to offer your audience that views your videos on your web site, or on Viddler’s web site, a larger resolution video - you may do so by creating a larger file to upload to Viddler. Again, this is optional - but we see it as a significant advantage at no extra cost.
Upload your video to Viddler
Before you publish your video to your site, you need to upload your video to Viddler. Viddler’s uploader allows for multiple file uploads - each one being as large as 500MB! If you have been a video podcaster for quite awhile, you may have many episodes that you’d like to upload at once. Take advantage of our bulk uploader to make this as simple for you as possible.
One you’ve uploaded your video, we recommend giving it an appropriate title, description, and tags. You can even add tags to the timeline to help segregate your video for your audience. To learn how to do these things, visit our learn more area.
Upload your video to your site
No need to change your current routine. You still upload the copy of your video fit for distribution to your site/server. This will be the video that is enclosed in your site’s feed, and will be distributed to your audience.
Write your entry
Again, your normal routine of writing up your “show notes” would apply, but there is one extra thing you need to do - paste in the proper HTML embed code to embed Viddler’s flash player on your site to stream your video in the browser.
The embed code is easy to retrieve and copy.
Find the video on Viddler you want to share
Click the green + icon in the timeline
Click share
Select whether you’d like to start the video at the beginning, or at the point of the playhead
Select copy code.
The HTML embed code has now been copied to your clipboard, so you may now paste that code into your entry code.
Setup your enclosure
Here is the “tricky” part. Once you have the KG Enclosure Flex plugin installed, a new menu in your WordPress admin will appear on the “Write Page”. This menu allows you to select which URL in your entry should be included in your feed as an enclosure. This is extremely useful in that it will actually setup the correct size and type of the enclosure by actually looking at the file.
NOTE: You must have the file uploaded prior writing your post. You must also use the full url to the file. If your site is viddler.com - you must link to your files as http://www.viddler.com/video.mpg - this is the only way your audience will be able to download the file(s) correctly.
Publish!
You are now ready to publish your content. Once you’ve done that you should be taking full advantage of Viddler’s enhanced features as well as distributing your content the same way you’ve always done. This should save you tons of bandwidth costs, retain your distribution options to your audience, and give your browsing audience a much better experience going forward.
We hope you are as excited to use these methods as we are - and we hope to continue to make your life easier while providing the richest experience possible for Viddler’s users and your audiences.
If you have any questions or comments about this process, please send me a message, or you can respond through our forum thread for this topic, or just leave a comment on this post and I will be sure to help you out in anyway I can.
Selecting users on Viddler to be your “friend” is quick and easy. But did you know that you can group these friends together in groups called “Buddy lists” which will then make it very easy to share videos with that group?
An example of this would be if you have a video that you only want your family to see and not the rest of the world. You could add all of your family member’s usernames to a group called “Family” - which will then make it quick and easy to share that video with them, without having to remember all of their usernames.
I’m sure you could find even more uses than I’ve described here. Perhaps you want to only share a video with those in your company? Or, maybe you have a list of paying subscribers that you could share that video with? The possibilities seem endless.
If you have any questions regarding our friends features, you can contact me or leave a comment here. I hope you enjoyed the demo and start to utilize this powerful feature.
What can you do if you find yourself without your video equipment or only having access to a local Internet café, and you want to record some video? Use Viddler’s record feature!
We’ve setup a quick tutorial for you to learn how to use a webcam to quickly record some video.
Viddler supports most webcams including DV camcorders and even Apple’s iSight cameras. If you have any trouble using this service, feel free to contact us or comment here and we’ll get it sorted out for you.
I look forward to seeing your recorded video soon!
We’ve been getting this question quite a bit recently: “How do I subscribe to your blog?”. Well here is your answer in the usual Viddler-fashion:
So what do you need? If you have not already switched to Firefox (a modern browser that can be used on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux) we suggest that you do so. Using Firefox will guarantee the best experience when using our site! It will also make it much easier to subcribe to our blog. If you are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (or, IE) you should have various options after clicking the feed as well.
We appreciate the question and we hope our answer will help you to better keep up-to-date with Viddler. Any other questions we can answer?
Viddler is full of great features, and you can use them to your advantage!
How can you do this? I’ll point out some examples and maybe you can follow their lead to give your video’s viewers the best experience possible. Also, I’ll be doing some demo videos in the near future that will cover each of these features in detail, so that you can get started using them quickly and easily.
One of the recent best uses of Viddler’s powerful features has been since76’s Excel Tips demos. Not only is the quality of the video and audio very good (which takes advantage of our 500Mb per video upload feature), but he manages to use Viddler’s timed comments and tags features to give his viewers a really nice experience.
Change the video above:10 Excel Tips to Make Your Life EasierPart 1 | Part 2.
since76 uses timed comments, which you can learn to use in our Learn More section, in order to create “chapters” in his video. One could also use timed tags to do the same thing, but either way that you decide to do it, will allow your video’s viewers to skip to certain points in a video without needing to “scrub” to search for it.
Here is an example. In Part one of his two part Excel Tips series, he has a “chapter” dealing with “Quickly inserting columns and rows“. Clicking on that link will send you directly to that point in the video. since76 has taken the time to create numerous chapters in his videos to help the viewer have a better experience when learning to use Excel more efficiently.
You too can use Viddler’s powerful features to create the best possible experience for the viewers of your video. If you need any help send me a message, or leave a comment!
