Video playback in google video

Well, today I was trea­ted with the plea­sant sur­prise of goo­gle video adding fully func­tio­nal video pla­ying sup­port to their goo­gle video ser­vice. Peo­ple have gra­dually been uploa­ding their videos to goo­gle and various tele­vi­sion sta­tions have sub­mit­ted their shows with search able clo­sed cap­tions. Until now this was the extent of the video ser­vice, you could see when a show aired, search its script, seen when new shows were going to air and see a sim­ple screen shot taken so far in. All this being pretty use­less to someone living in the Uni­ted King­dom (although still very cool, I hope for some BBC inte­gra­tion soon). Now howe­ver, goo­gle video pro­vi­des video. Goo­gle results that have a pla­ya­ble video show up with a little play icon next to them. Upon ope­ning the page there are options to start the video from various 30 second inc­re­ments, upon clic­king, the video plays right there and then in the brow­ser. Now, most in brow­ser video pla­yers are fairly bulky, con­sume con­si­de­ra­ble resour­ces, load the brow­ser with unnee­ded hin­dran­ces, pro­vide anno­ying applet con­trols and require buf­fe­ring times. Howe­ver, goo­gle video is based upon the popu­lar and utterly fan­tas­tic open source “video­lan pla­yer” open source setup. VLC gene­rally plays all stan­dard codecs with ease and has highly func­tio­nal strea­ming options, sub­tit­les, mul­ti­ple video and audio stream capa­bi­li­ties and much much more (inc­lu­ding the option to view a video in ASCII). This goo­gle video vie­wer loads seam­lessly, has no nasty but­ton inter­fa­ces, does not load the brow­ser or cause over the top cpu usage and has a once click full-screen option (i.e. click the video for fullsc­reen). The video requi­res very little buf­fe­ring time and is of sui­ta­ble qua­lity and reso­lu­tion for fullsc­reen and tele­vi­sion play­back. I really do love it and I have been pla­ying for the last hour or so.

“The clips play right in the page using the brand new Goo­gle Video Vie­wer, which was crea­ted by our engi­neer Aaron Lee using code from the open source Video­lan pro­ject. It works great in both Fire­fox and IE, and we’ve desig­ned it not to fight with any other video plu­gins you might have. We’re relea­sing the Win­dows ver­sion first, with Mac coming soon.”

“A fea­ture we’re espe­cially plea­sed with is search within a video, which means you will get a result poin­ting to the pre­cise spot in the video that matches your query. Try loo­king for ser­gey brin and you’ll see what I mean. There are even more peo­ple get­ting crea­tive with video here. So have fun watching, or shoot your own videos — and keep sen­ding them in!”