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Showing posts with label Video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video. Show all posts

Five must-own NES games on the Wii U Virtual Console

We've gone and put together a short video outlining our picks for five NES Virtual Console games that you might not have considered on the Wii U Virtual Console, but are worth checking out.

So there's not going to be the obvious choices of Super Mario Bros. or Mega Man in there. Rather, these are games that you might have played back in the day and forgotten about, or just passed over for whatever reason.

Be sure to let us know what you think of the games in the comments, and, of course, let us know what your favourite NES games are (and what NES games you're still hoping to see appear on the Wii U Virtual Console!)

Enjoy the video!


Video review: Stick It To The Man (PS3)

Review by Matt S. 

You would expect a game that has been written by the guy that did Adventure Time to be a little crazy, and Stick It To The Man is indeed a little crazy.

It's a game that really revels in being self aware and providing quite juvenile humour to an adult audience. Somehow within that context it also manages to offer a mature (but sadly forgettable), adventure/ puzzle game with some real mind twisters.

Developer diary; check out the newest goss on Dracula

Konami has released a new developer diary to give players insight into the upcoming Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2. This is a game that we have been keeping our eyes on, because we rather liked the first and playing as Dracula is always good value.

Developer diaries often provide tantalising bits of insight into the development of a game, and in this one you'll get to see Konami producer, David Cox, as well as the mind behind the game, Enric Alvarez, chat about the changes they're bringing to the Castlevania formula, as well as what it's like to work with Robert Carlyle; the best person to play Dracula we can think of this side of Gary Oldman.

The video's only around five minutes long, so use your coffee break to kick back, relax, and get a feel for how a developer goes about turning a Gothic masterpiece into an interactive game;

On DDNet TV; Mario Golf (Nintendo 64)

For many of us at Digitally Downloaded, Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64 was one of the finest games created for that very fine console.

Some NBA 2K14 tidbits

NBA 2K14 is gaining a head of steam as we inch closer to the start of the NBA season.

Easy professional translations for YouTube video captioning

This quick-tip is about an extension to YouTube's captioning service. It's relevant to bloggers who focus strongly on videos as a complement to their blog content.


quick-tips logo
In Septemeber 2012, YouTube introduced a feature that let you or your friend translate the captions of videos (that you own) into additional languages.

Now they've partnered with some professional translation firms so you can get a quote, order, receive and pay for professional translation - all within YouTube / Google.    So you don't have to worry about whether your friend's high-school Spanish is really good enough for your international audience!

The first step to doing this is uploading a transcript file for your video. Something to bear in mind if you do this:  If SEO matters for your blog, then you probably don't want to put the transcript into both YouTube and the blog, because that would create duplicate content.

Takeout now lets you download your own YouTube videos

This Quick-Tip is about accessing your own YouTube videos, using Google's Takeout / Data-liberation service.

If you upload a video using the Blogger Post Editor's video icon, then it's stored in Google Videos - which is now retired except for the part that hosts vids uploaded thru Blogger.   (This was where they were being put  the last time I checked, which was a few months ago)

Many people dislike this, and prefer to upload their vids to YouTube first, and then link to the YouTube video from Blogger.  This gives
  • Better control over the size of the video you display in your blog / website
  • Video management tools (sorely lacking in Google Videos). 
  • Statistics about viewers
  • The chance to earn money separately from your blog if your video becomes popular
  • Access to many more YoutTube features.
This is similar to the recommendation to upload pictures to Picasa independently of the post-editor, and putting them into your posts via the URL - it just gives you more control.

Now you can use Google Takeout to download a copy of the original for videos that you have uploaded to YouTube - without changing the format.   This is different to YouTube's download function, which only lets you download a transformed/transcoded version (eg a .wmv I just checked was available for download from YouTube as .mp4).

This can be used if you are:

Google Video being retired - impact for Blogger?


quick-tips logo
If you upload a video through the icon in Blogger's Post Editor, it is stored in Google Videos - and AFAIK the only way to access it is via Blogger.

Google have now announced that :
Later this summer [August 2012], all remaining hosted video on Google Video will be moved to YouTube. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re moving the remaining hosted content to YouTube as private videos.

You can manage the videos uploaded to Google Video using http://www.google.com/video/upload/Status

Consequences:

My first thought was that if you have a blog with videos uploaded before the Post-editor switched over to use <<whatever else>> for videos, then these will stop working, because the location will be incorrect when your videos are migrated.

But some initial testing makes me think this isn't right,  I just tried loading this video to a test blog.

Looking at the Google Videos status page referred to in the article didn't show it - or any videos, even though I know there are a few on my travel blog from 2007. Examining the HTML behind the post didn't give any clues, it just looks like this:
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <object class="BLOG_video_class" contentid="4b6e060e39565a4a" height="266" id="BLOG_video-4b6e060e39565a4a" width="320"></object></div>
But then I viewed the page and examined the source.   It has gems like this:
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object width="320" height="266" class="BLOG_video_class" id="BLOG_video-4b6e060e39565a4a" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/get_player">
<param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF">
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true">
<param name="flashvars" value="flvurl=http://redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?id%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26itag%3D5%26source%3Dblogger%26app%3Dblogger%26cmo%3Dsensitive_content%253Dyes%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1343576696%26sparams%3Did,itag,source,ip,ipbits,expire%26signature%3D81F0B23AAD667B6DFA253D870F9291421C511D1.14E0BA9FA0741AD193482CC06CEA121F670BDBE%26key%3Dck1&amp;iurl=http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer2?app%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3Djlmosd6i-dm_mUe5oOEcYFhrGm4&amp;autoplay=0&amp;ps=blogger">
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/get_player" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
width="320" height="266" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"
flashvars="flvurl=http://redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?id%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26itag%3D5%26source%3Dblogger%26app%3Dblogger%26cmo%3Dsensitive_content%253Dyes%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1343576696%26sparams%3Did,itag,source,ip,ipbits,expire%26signature%3D81F0B23AAD667B6DFA253D870F9291421C511D1.14E0BA9FA0741AD193482CC06CEA121F670BDBE%26key%3Dck1&iurl=http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer2?app%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3Djlmosd6i-dm_mUe5oOEcYFhrGm4&autoplay=0&ps=blogger"
allowFullScreen="true" /></object>
<a href="rtsp://v4.cache5.googlevideo.com/ChoLENy73wIaEQlKWlY5DgZuSxMYDSANFEgDDA==/0/0/0/video.3gp" type="video/3gpp"><img width="320" height="266" alt="video" src="http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer2?app=blogger&amp;contentid=4b6e060e39565a4a&amp;offsetms=5000&amp;itag=w160&amp;sigh=jlmosd6i-dm_mUe5oOEcYFhrGm4" class="BLOG_mobile_video_class" id="BLOG_mobile_video-4b6e060e39565a4a"></a></div

The bit I've put in bold ( flvurl=http://redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback  ) makes me think that they've coded around this, so (a bit like Friend Connect) Blogger users are the one exception to the "Google Video is bring turned off" rule, and that we don't have to worry about suddenly losing videos from pre 2009.  

I'd like a bit more detail though, since this issue isn't covered in the Google announcement at all.

Fingers crossed it all works ok.

I'm very interested in hearing about any more research / answers you find about this change.  You know where the comment form is, please use it and share what you know!



One last thought:

Videos that you added to Google Videos yourself

If you do have videos on your blog that you manually loaded to Google Videos and then put into your blog, you  can either:
  • Download them yourself, move them to a new location in YouTube, and edit your blog-post to use this new location, OR
  • Wait for Google to move the videos, then go into YouTube and make them public (not private), and then edit your blog-post to point to the new location.
That said, if you happen to have transferred ownership of your blog from another account to yours, and you no longer have access to that other Google account, then you have a problem: You cannot access them now through the link (becasue it's not your current account that owns them), and they will be transferred to YouTube as private videos under that other account: you will still have no way to access them, and the link will change.

The only option would be to somehow make a copy of the video using the existing vid in Google Videos via your blog - and do it before 20 August. Good luck.

Getting blog videos indexed, with schema.org

You can put videos into blog post using an icon on the post-editor toolbar - they are one type of file that you don't need to host elsewhere.

If you do this, Google will (eventually) index the contents of your blog post, based on the text in the post, and the file-names of the file(s)you've used.

But the spiders behind search haven't quite got the hang of speech and image recognition yet: as with images, you need to explicity tell them about your content.

Webmaster Central have announced a new way of doing this called schema-markup.org.  This asks people who provide videos to show them in their websites using code like this:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">  <h2>Video: <span itemprop="name">Title</span></h2>  <meta itemprop="duration" content="T1M33S" />  <meta itemprop="thumbnailURL" content="thumbnail.jpg" />  <meta itemprop="embedURL"    content="http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123" />  <object ...>    <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ...>  </object>  <span itemprop="description">Video description</span></div>
Sidebar
The code originally given in Google's post was missing the / at the start of the closing </div> statement. I suspect they'll fix it soon - but it's why you may get a message like


"your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: DIV"
Fix it by simply changing the second <div> to </div>. 

Unfortunately the suggested won't work for Blogger users, because the Post-editor doesn't let us use meta-tags.    You can put the code into your post if you want, but they will be stripped out when the post is published or viewed in Compose mode.

But there are some options you can use to tell search engines about your video conent:

1) Edit your template, add a conditional statement that is only applied to the post that contains the video, and put the schema.org code (without the H2 and Object statement, of course) into the <head> section.   Something like this:
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://url of your post"'>
PUT THE SCHEMA.ORG META-TAG STATEMENTS IN HERE
</b:if>
Disclaimer: I haven't tried ths myself. But it strikes me that it should work, give the way we deal with other meta-tags when necessary. However "should" is an "interesting" word.   Maybe it won't work, if the tags are not in the same <div> as the video.


2) Put the description of the video into the blog-post - just work it into the text naturally.

3) Use a title statement to give the video some hover text LINK (I guess this works for videos - haven't tried it) or alt-text.

For both of the last two, remember that indexing of text on your blog will link to your blog-post, not to the video, so it may not get the "videos are cool" factor that seems to influence search results.   But they are both easy things to do.

4) Load your video to Youtube (or Vimeo or wherever), and put the content description into the fields there, along with links to your blog, of course.

This will have the vids-are-cool effect, but the search traffic will go to the host site, and may not ever get to your blog -  to get any search-traffic benefit, you need to to have good links to your blog in their the video-site information, or good promotion of it in the video itself.


5) Or maybe the Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds approach that Google's article LINK also mentioned work well-enough for Blogger-users.    (Sorry, I have no time to investigate either of these - am keen to get comments from anyone knows more about them though.)