How to Share a YouTube Video

The great thing about YouTube is that it puts the video medium in your hands but extends your reach world wide.

You can upload videos from a variety of sources including directly from your desktop camera or cell phone. The site accepts several formats including WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG . YouTube recommend uploading videos in MPEG4 at 320x240 pixels with MP3 audio, although you’ll also have very good quality in uncompressed AVI in the same dimensions. The size of your video is generally limited to 100 MB.It will take a few minutes to upload the file depending on the speed of your connection. Conversion takes time too.

One advantage of posting a video on YouTube is that it a offers more universal playback capability than posting on your own site in of the source formats the site accepts. YouTube videos are based on Macromedia's FlashPlayer 7 with the Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec.

Sharing your videos is one of the great joys of YouTube. I have to admit that I’ve derived a lot of satisfaction from posting a twenty year old student comedy I directed, a satire of Miami Vice, that has now been seen on YouTube by more than 1300 viewers.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Establish friends and family lists. These lists and any others you make, will let you quickly share your video with a large number of people. You can click on the “share video” link and hit the “send” button to reach all of them.

2. To maximize your viewing audience, make sure your video is marked public. If you elect to make your it private you still have the option of sharing it with your friends and / or family, but the video would be playable by only those listed. Otherwise, you’ll be the only one who can watch it.

3. Share the video’s URL. Each video on YouTube has a unique URL (Universal Resource Locator) My satire, “Hollywood Vice” is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXbQljfr2EY With a unique URL, you can simply send the address it to friends in an email or post it on a site like this. Anybody who is interest can simply click of the URL if it has a hyperlink, or cut and paste the address to watch it.

4. People can subscribe to your channel. Anybody who uploads videos to YouTube establishes a channel. Subscribers are notified whenever you upload a video. My channel Checkpix, currently plays nine videos.

5. You can also create a stream which lets you open a chat room with the parameters you define. You’ll be able to chat with participants in real time while you share your or any other YouTube videos. To create a stream, go to http://www.youtube.com/streams_main

6. YouTube offers a great feature for webmasters. You can post your video on YouTube and then embed it into one or your own web pages by cutting and pasting the HTML code that the site creates for you. Here’s an example of a YouTube video embedded on one of my web pages: http://www.reverseagingnow.com/preview.htm The advantage to you is that you don't have to pay for any additional storage to have the video play on your site.

[egottwald]

on 6/23/2009 In Step 6, you don't mention whether the video has to be set up as 'public' in order to be viewed from a web site link. I'm assuming that it does, but it would be nice if the required setup was explicitly stated.

[MavricTv]

on 12/19/2008 Just wanted yo say that there are other sites where it's easier to upload and you can win stuff too!

This is a great place to post videos and you can actually get something in return!

http://www.mavric.tv .

It has over a dozen channels and currently about 300 videos, and growing!

If you upload just 5 videos you get an entry to win a lottery for a brand new Seagate Free Agent GO drive, beats buying it for $199 US. Other things you can win are a Lottery for any product on Logitech.com ($200 US value), a $50 Itunes gift card or even 1 year of mavric media digital content database premium account for free (normally costs $1100 US). More entries, more chances.

You guys should try it out.