-
Mobile to YouTube to Blog
Ok, so the grandparents live abroad, they sent the kids some presents for Christmas, and the kids need to say thank you and wish them a happy new year. They could write a letter, but ‘Hey’ this is the modern world and I have video on my mobile, and a blog. How difficult could it be? First the plan:
- Take video
- Upload to computer
- Upload to YouTube
- Take embedding code from YouTube, paste into HTML of blog post
- Send email to grandparents with link to blog
- EASY!
This particular plan took around 3 weekends to fulfill. The first part was easy enough, once I realised that the software that came with the phone was really difficult to get working and just used the phone as an extra drive instead. ‘Hold on though, what file format is that? 3GP! I haven’t seen that one before, lets see if YouTube will take that’.
The answer was “No” unless you want to send the file via email from your mobile. I needed to convert the file. It didn’t take too long to locate a free bit of software from a company called Miksoft that would convert the 3GP file into an AVI file, and it seemed to work fine. ‘Hold on though, that 1.5mb 3GP file is now a 200mb AVI file, that will take an age to upload and look, the limit when uploading a video to YouTube is 100mb - AH! But I have a smaller file here, its not the Grandparents one, but at least I can try this one, get it up on YouTube and execute the rest of my plan for satisfaction’s sake’.
I uploaded the file, looked at the thumbnail result on YouTube only to realise that the image was upside down. ‘Its only the thumbnail’ I told myself - it wasn’t - the whole damn video played upside down - ‘It didn’t do that in Windows Media Player - Now what?’.
‘I know, I’ll get some more conversion software’. I tried loads of different variations, but pretty much all the software I downloaded was for evaluation only and wouldn’t convert the whole file only half of it (you have to buy the product to get the full functionality). A friend suggested MIcrosoft Media Encoder. Now that would surely work, and it was free. It didn’t.
I did a series of searches prefixed with the words “How to..” and finally found myself on the Miksoft site again, but this time on its message board. The first question I saw was “Can anyone tell me why my videos keep coming out upside down?” The solution was another piece of software. ‘Ok just one more download’. My programmes menu was almost cascading off my screen by now with all the new software I had installed, so one more wouldn’t make any difference.
The message board suggested re-processing the AVI file through a piece of software called VirtualDub. This I tried, but the file size was still enormous at the other end. ‘Perhaps it would now go through windows media encoder and I could convert it to a WMV file, thus compressing it. I tried it, it worked - Yippee.
Uploading to YouTube is simple if you have an account, and not a whole lot more difficult if you haven’t, so this bit ewas easy, as was copying the conveniently provided code to embed the video and pasting it into the HTML of the blog. Just one thing to look out for is the size of the embedded video window, which you might need to adjust to fit the post column of your blog.
So I did it, and its easy. Well it will be for you guys if you decide to do the same, just use the links above, it will take you minutes rather than days, since I should point out that the description above is really only a precis of the numerous variations, combinations and file conversions I tried without success. And just to prove it works:
Having had the opportunity to step away from the world of technology (well most of it) for a few months. Hannah has provided a far more pragmatic solution. Surely you should just have got the grandparents to stand on their heads!