Google Video

About a month ago when I started taking baby steps in RDI, I also began shooting short clips of some of our activities with my digital camera. Since these clips are memory hogs and my dear husband travels often, I uploaded them to Google Video, which I chose over You Tube because I can keep the clips private. I already had a Google account for my blog, so I had no problem uploading videos, which allows me to share videos in Aut-2B-Home in Carolina, too.

In spite of the cons (which I will explain in a moment), I am so thankful I did because about two weeks ago I had to reformat my computer: I lost everything, except the videos I had uploaded. One silver lining in a very dark cloud!

One con of storing clips at Google Video is that they are converted to .gvi or .gvp files. If you download the clips back onto your computer, you will need either Adobe Flash Player 7.0+ or Google Video Player to play the clip offline. Over the weekend, I downloaded the clips to my sister-in-law's Mac and found that selecting "Video iPod/Sony PSP" (located to the right of the download button) worked!

Yesterday, Pamela and I reviewed a series of small pictures extracted from video footage I shot on our digital camera. I retrieved these images by watching the video online at Google Video and clicking the word "Details". This causes still images from the video (taken at interverals) to appear taken. To save these images, I put my cursor on an image, right clicked, and selected "Save Image As".

Today, I stumbled across another con: Windows Media and Real Player do not like the Google format. But, I figured out a way to convert the .gvp files to .avi: first, I downloaded a nifty utility GVideoFix that makes the conversion to a format acceptable to Windows Movie Maker and then DivX so that the images would play. Right now, I am looping together and editing larger video clips to help me better see the big picture in Pamela's progress with RDI.

Okay, your eyes are glazing over--I can see it. Enough geek talk for one day!