Despite YouTube video content being available online, all of the time (unless it’s taken down for copyright reasons), that’s not always what’s wanted. There are situations where you might want to view a video offline, want to incorporate a video into some other content (such as a slideshow or a mashup), or want to keep a copy for ease of access or performance reasons. Another issue is deploying video on non-Web platforms: YouTube offers no support for downloading or transcoding for mobile devices.
Youtube confirms IPv6 support
There are a number of tools for copying (i.e. downloading) or capturing (i.e. recording) Web content but they don’t make transcoding or embedding the result easy and they provide no built-in support for social network sharing.
A new service, EQ Bar from Equilibrium solves these problems through a free widget that can create new embed code for any YouTube video. (See Network World’s YouTube channel.)
When you find a YouTube video you want to enhance you simply copy the YouTube embed code and go to the EQ Bar site. You then paste the embed code into a Web form, select the output format (WordPress, Blogger, or HTML – note that Posterous and tumblr are not supported), click on a checkbox to agree to the Terms of Service, click on the “Generate New Embed Code” button, and copy the new embed code. You then deploy the embed code to your own blog or Web page and the rendered result now shows the video with the EQ Bar below it.
The EQ Bar allows you to select a destination for the video which includes 3GPP devices (BlackBerrys, LG VU, Nokia, Palm Pre, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and most Windows Mobile devices), iPod, iTouch, Mac, PC, Storm, Apple TV, WinMob, PSP, and WinJP, along with Android, Blackberry and iPhone phones.
That is an impressive lineup although curiously, there’s no support for Twitter and Facebook built in. While those aren’t delivery mechanisms in the same way that e-mail and cellular multimedia messaging services (MMS) are, the ability to link back to a deployed YouTube embed would seem obviously valuable.
When you select a destination you’ll be first asked to enter either the recipient’s e-mail address or cell number and a subject. Here’s where EQ Bar could improve its design: You have to specify the carrier MMS gateway and while Equilibrium has all of that information available to users in a FAQ it beats me why they didn’t build that directly into the EQ Bar’s user interface as a pick list.
Before you can send the video you have to specify gender and age. This is odd for two reasons: First, it will raise obvious privacy concerns and as its only two questions it is guaranteed many people will enter false information. Second, I assume that they are asking for your details, not those of the recipient but that isn’t clear.
Anyway, the result is that the EQ Bar works and does so for free. Equilibrium offers this service as an entry point to their more sophisticated paid-for version that supports a huge range of customizations and metrics gathering.
It will be interesting to see how long it will take for someone to “enhance” the EQ Bar so that, for example, a Greasemonkey script could add a context menu entry so that right clicking on a YouTube video immediately produces an EQ Bar embedded version. If the guys at Equilibrium read this and do that hack for themselves let’s hope they remember who gave them the idea …
