scientists are using youtube

[miriam_e]

How cool is this? Scientists are posting videos online to show each other precisely how they do experiments.
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061120/full/061120-12.html

I must admit I do find youtube annoying and tending to the evil side (typical of bloody Adobe and their involvement). You can't save the videos for posterity. When they disappear from youtube, they're gone. Truly ephemeral culture -- the historian's and archaeologists's nightmare come true.

Stuff posted to youtube leaves no footprints in the sand. It is about as close to a complete waste as you can come while still having some kind of immediate use.

Comments

[drjon.livejournal.com]

If you're interested, there's an app which you can use to save youtubes to your harddrive for later viewing. It's a Firefox plugin.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll look it up. (I betcha it's in some crap Adobe format though, that can't be converted to anything more standard.) Being able to save it is a step in the right direction at least. Cool.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

Uh, Google bought YouTube, not Adobe.

YouTube videos are in FLC format, suitable for Flash. A good free video player like VLC or Mplayer will do the trick.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yep, I knew that Google bought it, but I thought that viewing the videos required a macromedia (Adobe) plugin. If they're FLC then I could play them in heaps of things. That surprises me. FLC is a really inefficient format.

Thanks for the info. Looks like I'll have to retract my venom about youtube.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

Oops, I got it confused. It's FLV, not FLC. FLC is a really old format :) Still what I said about free video players still holds.

[revbobbob.livejournal.com]

Yup. My favorite for .flv files is VLC Media Player. It's gradually winning me over from Media Player Classic.