Google Video

I was recently tasked with making sure videos work properly on our website. After some tweaking and debugging, I found that the videos work great. We're using a plugin to let us use a very simple notation to add a video. The plugin is by Joshua Eldridge and it uses Jeron Wijering's FLV Media Player. One problem you might encounter is that maybe your videos are too big, too long or you maybe don't have the bandwidth to host them.

We had to figure out a way to load the video faster and make sure it remains always available even under heavy server load, so I turned to Google Video. We already use Google for business for our mail, calendar, docs and other services so I thought, why not try it out. Uploading was very easy, just as you would expect. I've uploaded videos to YouTube before and this was very similar. I guess the difference might be that this video won't show up under YouTube. The video is over 85 minutes long so it is taking a while to process. I'll update this soon.

Update: It took about a full day to process this whole video and then it was available. Unfortunately it cannot be made available to the public. I'm not sure why, especially under a paid Google business account. Wouldn't you expect this to be an option just like it is to publicly share your calendar, documents and pages and other services that come bundled with the Google apps. So scrap the idea that you can use your Google Apps account to host videos for your website. We ended up using it for internal users only for now.