I’ve been playing around a lot lately with Google Video… surfing through the “popular videos”:2… searching for “WRC rally videos”:3… and generally just wasting a bunch of time.

One of the great features that I’ve found on Google Video is the ability to host your videos. Once you have created a Google account, click on the “submit your video”:4 link at the bottom of the Google Video “homepage”:1. A preference page then loads followed by their “terms of service”:5 (which you might want to read, since you are agreeing to offer them a fairly broad license regarding your videos). After you agree to their terms of service a blank _video status_ page then loads. On this, you’ll find a link that says “_Click here to get started_”:6 which loads this page for downloading Google’s uploader client.

The uploader client is pretty basic allowing you to select videos for uploading.

Once the videos have finished uploading, go back to the Google Video homepage, click on the _submit your video_ link and resign-in to your account. This will load the video status page now listing the uploaded videos.

For each video you upload, you will need to click on the _Click here to proceed_ link in the status column. This brings up the video information page where you add descriptive meta data for the video (useful if you want people to find it via searching).

The video information page also has a _Advanced option_ link if you want to make your video pay-for-play. I haven’t used this option, so I don’t know how that whole mechanism works. Google then “verifies”:8 the video before it is available for searching and viewing.

But the best part of Google Video is that you can embed videos into your page. On the video’s page on Google Video you can find a _Put on site_ link on the right hand side. This opens a window displaying the HTML needed to embed the video using a Flash player. The code looks something like this (the display of the code breaks in IE and I am too lazy to fix this… but you should be using Firefox anyway).

Which renders to…

Zoinger says, video is here.

[8(How long does the video verification take)]http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26563&topic=1488

[7(Zoinger on the Costco Kirkland signature grill)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/07/17/costco-bbq-the-kirkland-signature%e2%84%a2-grill/

[6(Uploader page)]https://upload.video.google.com/UploadInfo

[5(Google Video terms of service)]https://upload.video.google.com/Terms

[4(Submit your video to Google Video)]https://upload.video.google.com/

[3(WRC rally videos on Google Video)]http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=WRC+rally&so=0

[2(Google Video popular video page)]http://video.google.com/videopopularpage

[1(Zoinger on MP4 in point-and-shoots)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2006/01/19/mpeg-4-video-codec-a-must-for-your-digital-camera/