Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

It might be difficult for our American readers to fully appreciate how frustrating it is for the rest of the world to hear about these cool video streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon VOD, etc.) and not be able to access them. Well, finally I can cross one of those off my list: Netflix has launched their video streaming service in Canada. It's streaming only; no DVD rentals are part of the deal, but as a Zip customer, I'm OK with that. I immediately signed up this morning when I saw the email come in, and within 60 seconds, I was streaming a movie. I've got to say, that's pretty damn cool - it's what I've been waiting for! Xbox 360 support isn't ready yet for Canadians; they say it's coming this fall. Read more...

"If you upload videos to YouTube and feel restricted by the 1GB limit, YouTube now offers 2GB of wiggle room as well as the ability to directly link to and embed high definition video."

If you use YouTube, you're going to like this: YouTube has expanded upload limits to 2 GB, which is around 60 minutes of 720p HD quality video. And if you have a blog where you like to embed your YouTube videos, you can now embed it in HD. One thing worth noting: if you're embedding at 600 pixels wide, there's not much point in using the HD option. The high-quality (HQ) option looks quite good at that size. To show the HD option, you'll want 800+ pixels in width - or tell people to go full screen. Good stuff - thanks YouTube!

A mere 15 days after I uploaded my first wide-screen video and asked YouTube to release a 16:9 aspect ratio player, they implemented it. Am I good or what? For my next feat, I'll be asking for 10,000 shares of Google stock for $1. ;-) OK, back to reality: YouTube has obviously been working on this for a while now, and it's nice to see tha they finally implemented it. Unfortunately they're not doing smart detection of the content - meaning the 99.9% of all the videos on YouTube that are in 4:3 aspect ratio will be displayed with big black bars on the right and left. Worse still, if you hard-rendered a 16:9 video to fit in 4:3 like I did with two of my videos, you end up with big black bars on the top, bottom, left, and right. Yuck! Still, at least all the 16:9 videos I'm shooting are much bigger on the YouTube page. It's great to see YouTube making this change. It still pales in quality to what I'm seeing with Motionbox, but there are some quality hacks out there that can improve the quality.

My headache now is trying to figure out the best video deployment strategy - I use the incredibly awesome TubeMogul to distribute my videos to 11 different video sharing sites at once, but many of them have 100 MB limits on the upload, so I might have to start uploading two different versions of my video - three if you count the one I upload to Motionbox. Talk about a headache...the things I do to bring you guys awesome quality videos! ;-)

About two months ago, I purchased a Canon HF100 high-definition video camera to replace my ageing but still totally sweet Canon GL2 (that thing has such great optics!). It took me a while to re-create my template in 16:9 format, but I did and published my first two HD videos to YouTube...and I was quite disappointed with the results. YouTube only offers a 4:3 aspect ratio player, so 16:9 videos look pretty tiny with those big black bars on the top and bottom. I set out to find a better solution for embedding videos on Thoughts Media sites, and I think I've found one: MotionBox.

I say "I think" because while the video quality is utterly fantastic, and for $20 per year they offer a lot of value, I've been seeing some problematic playback issues today - sometimes the video will start right away, other times it will take 30+ seconds before it starts, and sometimes it won't start at all, instead showing a black box. And sometimes it will just "break" and stop playing. These are obviously serious problems, but I don't know if MotionBox is just having a bad day, or if my bandwidth Kung-fu is weak today. So check out the video below and report back what you find - does it play back OK? Any problems or glitches?