I’ve been playing around a lot lately with Google Video… surfing through the popular videos… searching for WRC rally videos… 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 link at the bottom of the Google Video homepage. A preference page then loads followed by their terms of service (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 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 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).

<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvp.video.google.com%2Fvideodownload%3Fversion%3D0%26secureurl%3DkgAAABP63yM2VBrZUBJ8T2bJMEsxoqqt2ub8zG2o28teebSgxlvMj5MXpaHW3vLPzwpHA7YrQLMSU9wmhAaIBVV9RkVtWSH4oyJl4r491X1mal6ycLo2jyD7YYy7bQVKlireEfyHU4JYmsj1YlCdda3FBzOah68JcnmnLlgBT9Jj4mLsnXiPFRGE7Pe6NuaJttccmg1nm18a0ZAMPEmuOFG3cn8%26sigh%3Dt-bZ_XroJTJl4-PNvUvnmwevsQM%26begin%3D0%26len%3D9999%26docid%3D-125932142790559037&#038;thumbnailUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2FThumbnailServer%3Fcontentid%3D5041500b3f20c776%26second%3D5%26itag%3Dw320%26urlcreated%3D1139762106%26sigh%3D-W8MtDCsV8uZCL1OOaonlpgOPk8&#038;playerId=-125932142790559037&#038;playerMode=embedded" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" quality="best" bgcolor="#ffffff" scale="noScale" wmode="window" salign="TL" > </embed>

Which renders to…

Zoinger says, video is here.