Can I upload MP3 or WMA audio files to YouTube?
"I have audio files from my band's recording session that I want to put on YouTube. Every time I try to upload the files YouTube gives me an invalid file format error. I've tried both MP3 and WMA formats with the same error message. How can I upload my band's MP3 music tracks to YouTube?"
While YouTube may be among the best places on the Internet to find music by your favorite artist, it is not a music site. YouTube is a video site. The YouTube upload tool expects you to upload a video file format of some kind. YouTube specifically accepts MP4, MPG, AVI, MOV and WMV file formats. For your music files (or something like spoken audio from a speech) to upload successfully to YouTube, you need to convert it to a video format. Below are options that will make a video file with software from either a Mac or Windows PC.
Make YouTube Videos Look Better
YouTube is starting to roll out higher resolution versions of videos on the site. What this means for viewers is text that looks crisp; improved sound quality; and video that loses some of those soft moments and blocky transitions we've come to expect from watching YouTube videos. There are two ways to get better video from YouTube, depending on whether you do or do not have a YouTube account.
Ashampoo ClipFinder
Quickly search for videos across multiple video sites from one convenient search bar with Ashampoo ClipFinder. This free app searches YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Veoh, MySpace, iFilm and many other places, turning up videos based on your query. Thumbnails are displayed for all videos and you can watch videos without going to any of the sites. Download your favorites to your hard drive for offline viewing. Created by the people who brought you Movie Shrink and Burn, ClipFinder is one of the best tools I've seen for finding video. Movie search and downloading is comparable to what RealPlayer 11 delivers in ease of use, without all the extra overhead associated with the media library functionality of that app. Advanced search features do a good job of narrowing video search results to help return more meaningful results, which is highly useful if you are looking for specific types of online movies. ClipFinder requires free registration for use after the first 10 days. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
How to Get Your Own YouTube RSS Feed
"Is there an RSS feed with my YouTube videos people can subscribe to?"
YouTube recently publicized a bunch of RSS feeds for subscribing to popular topics and categories, but they haven't made it obvious how someone might subscribe to your YouTube channel via RSS. Thanks to their well documented section for developers, this is a relatively easy. Each YouTube user has their own unique RSS feed in the format:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/jakeludington/uploads
Just replace my YouTube username, with your own YouTube username in the URL and you'll have an RSS feed of only videos you uploaded to YouTube. You can find more ways to access your YouTube information, like an RSS feed of your Favorites and Playlists, see the detailed YouTube API documentation.
A slightly different approach to this, including an enclosure with a SWF video file, is to use a URL like this where the file is in the format username.rss. This is a little more complicated because other people could tag their videos with your user name and show up in your RSS feed.Here's an example:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/jakeludington.rss
Subscribe to my YouTube RSS feed
Roxio Buzz
Roxio is well known for making video tools. Their Easy Media Creator suite is a popular solution for editing movies, photos and audio. For some things, like quickly preparing a file for upload to YouTube, a full-fledged editing suite can be more software than you need. Enter Roxio Buzz - an editing tool for quickly cliping a portion of video for upload to YouTube, GoFish, Silverlight, or all three at the same time. The software supports WMV, AVI, MPEG-1, QuickTime MOV files, MPEG-2 and various implementations of MPEG-4, like 3gp and h.264. For photo slideshows, you can add pan and zoom motion, apply transitions and layer a soundtrack underneath images prior to uploading. While Roxio Buzz does not replace traditional editing tools, this is among the easiest tools for people who want a quick solution for getting their favorite clips from a hard drive to YouTube or other sites. [Windows 2000/XP/Vista $19.99]
YouTube Videos Playback Slow or Buffer
"When I watch YouTube videos, they constantly pause and restart, the video keeps saying it is buffering. Sometimes YouTube videos say they are loading forever. How can I fix this?"
When I first started watching videos online, I used to wait forever because my Internet connection was simply too slow for smooth playback. Assuming you're watching YouTube videos on a cable or DSL connection, there should be no reason your connection can't keep up. Slow YouTube videos seem to be a common problem, with YouTube video loading wait times becoming a problem that Google should be able to stay on top of. Without doing some network forensics to rule out your particular connection as the source of the slowdown, there's one free tool that should help make watching YouTube videos a smooth experience. I recommend installing SpeedBit Video Accelerator for YouTube, which pre-buffers videos and makes them playback in a more reliable way. As an added bonus, if you also watch videos on places like MySpace and Facebook, you should see some improvement there as well.
Add YouTube videos to PowerPoint
"How can I add a YouTube video to my PowerPoint presentation?"
PowerPoint supports adding many different types of movies, including AVI, MPEG, and Windows Media. YouTube videos, which are Flash FLV files, aren't directly supported. There are a couple of ways you can add a YouTube video to your PowerPoint slides. One way involves download a YouTube video and then converting the video to one of the formats supported by PowerPoint. If you know you'll be presenting somewhere with an Internet connection, you can embed the YouTube video in your PowerPoint slide following this slightly complicated series of steps.
Extract Music from a YouTube Video
Brian writes, "I want to download just the music from YouTube. How do you separate the video from the music?"
There's no easy way to strip the audio out of a YouTube video while it's still on the Web. It's far easier to first download the video to your computer and then strip the audio once the video is on your computer. Since the new version of RealPlayer integrated video downloading the download process is remarkably easy. Once the video is downloaded, you then strip the audio and convert it to MP3, WMA or your favorite audio format.
How to Randomize YouTube Videos with PHP
I recently got a question from someone about how to randomly display one of many YouTube videos in a player using PHP. I'm a hack when it comes to programming, but I came up with something that should do the trick in most cases. Basically, you put a YouTube video file on a single line of a text file, for as many videos as you want to randomize, then you use a couple lines of PHP to pick one of those IDs at random from the text file.
Post YouTube Videos to MyChurch
"How do you post a video on MyChurch?"
MyChurch.org is sort of a cross between MySpace and free blogging services like Wordpress.com, with a focus on making it easier for church congregations to collaborate online. MyChurch currently doesn't host videos the way YouTube or MySpace do, but they do provide a fairly easy system for linking to videos from video hosting services like YouTube. If you want to share your own video on MyChurch, you first need to upload the video to someplace like YouTube. After uploading the video follow these steps to link to your video in a MyChurch blog post.
