Online video

[ewx]

I think the spread of online video is one of the worst things to happen to the web for some time.

There's certainly some good stuff out there, and spending the occasional hour poking around Youtube can be amusing, and there are things that just don't make sense in any other medium; but an awful lot of content seems to have migrated into video

Comments

[livredor]

Agreed entirely. If you're trying to convey information, video is a terrible medium. And web video is particularly bad, because as well as the disruptive sound thing, you have to choose between tiny video with awful quality, or something utterly unreasonably greedy for bandwidth even in these days where a lot of people don't really count these things.

There are lots of things that video is good for; if you're trying to show a dynamic visual effect, then it's almost by definition the optimal medium. I really hate it when news sites show videos of a newsreader telling you the news, instead of a text article, though, and that's only the most prominent example.

[ewx]

The quality and resource usage questions don't really bother me; they could indeed be much better in some cases but quite often they're already up to the job, and presumably will improve over time in any case; like the poor rewind controls, an implementation detail.

[naath]

Also you have to have whatever thingwotsit they are using (usually Flash).

[shortcipher]

I think HTML 5 is supposed to contain a(nother) way to embed video without using Flash, hopefully offering people whatever it is they think they need that OBJECT doesn't provide. This has the added benefit of providing the same player UI for all sites, perhaps customisable by the user, rather than a billion different dodgy Flash-based players, each with their own bugs.

[ewx]

An effort somewhat sabotaged by Nokia, as I recall...

[aardvark179]

I can understand Bokia et al's sabotage, as long as submarine patents exist mandating a format like Ogg Theora is always going to give companies the fear, look at what happened with gif.

Having a standard element is still a good thing, it's sat there in the DOM with a standard interface for doing things to it, it can be styled along with everything else, and it will save things like the iPhone having to either work out that an attempt to embed some flash is really a link to a video over there, or dig through the flash itself to find the link.

[pseudomonas]

They also lack any sensible search function. Often if I look at a web page, I'll really just want the one paragraph that answers my question. That's impossible with a video.

[pseudomonas]

And of course, they're not terribly accessible either for reasons of disability or technical limitation.

[pseudomonas]

It has belatedly occurred to me that listening to the soundtrack of a video is probably more agreeable than listening to a screen-reader, so this point is somewhat diluted.

[j4]

Google have done some stuff towards auto-transcribing and searching videos, but there's still a long way to go.

[atreic]

Completely agree with you.

[Oddly, when robhu was discussing use of videos, one of his plus points over the text was that the video had convincing sounding people (that is, it had real voices that spoke in a convincing, engaging and authorative sort of way, and so was more likely to convert us to christianity) That really annoys me. OK, there is less tone of voice in written media. But if you're nominally conveying facts, you shouldn't need tone of voice to make them seem convincing.]

[ewx]

That seems like a fundamentally anti-intellectual position (on his part); if an important argument cannot stand on its own, then it ought to fall, rather than survive on cosmetic details.

[atreic]

Hemm maybe he didn't go quite as far as I am claiming, he just says 'there is value in body language and tone that alters the content of just the text.' Maybe it was my annoyance at videos jumping to fill in the gaps.

[sion_a]

There's also negative value in having the pedagogical and presentational skills of a decomposing sloth when you're clogging YouTube up with your "tutorial"1. Insisting on text, or even slides, increases the chances of getting a competent rendering.

1 This micro-rantulette brough to you courtesy of 1ngi's attempts to find an introduction to iMovie 06.

[imc]

you don't get the notes of someone's presentation online, you just get the video.

These days in my experience you don't get the notes, you get the PowerPoint file, which is (a) bloated, (b) of limited use to someone running in a Microsoft-free environment (though OpenOffice is quite good these days, it has to be said), and (c) often barely intelligible without the context that the presenter would have given during the actual talk.