Based on the CEDD descriptor the most important keyframe is really chosen well – just watch the video to know what I mean

With the auto color correlogram feature the dog is not explicitely part of the picture. However the first frame chosen (the big one) gives a good impression on the “bathing” part.

With the Gabor texture feature the dog gets prominent in the first place. Noite that the result is quite the same as the result kwith the Tamura texture feature not shown here.

With the most simple feature (RGB color histogram with L2 distance) the summary also looks appealing. There is a frame featuring the dog, one showing the whole scene and one for the hippo.

All in all I think the results are quite appealing. The runtime of my implementation is a fraction of actual video play time. Perhaps I’ll find some time to present the whole thing tomorrow at the barcamp

Image via Wikipedia

The other one features a bookmarklet for downloading the mp4 files of the videos. You just need to add it to your bookmarks and on click it will add a download link for the mp4 file.

Furthermore there is a “Better YouTube” Firefox plugin, which already does a lot of the things the articles describe.

Now for the meat: How to get your AVC files into a web page?

• Encode your video file. Use MediaCoder or any other tool to create an iPod or PSP compatible video. Take care that you select AVC for your target codec. It’s called MPEG-4 AVC in the PSP as well as in the iPod extension of Mediacoder for example (see screenshot).
• Download the FLV Mediaplayer and unzip it somewhere.
• Create a website where your video should be played and move the FLV Mediaplayer along with associated files and the video in a subdirectory of the page’s directory.
• Use the setup wizard to create the code for embedding your player.
  • Select “Mediaplayer with a single FLV”
  • Source: [relative subdirectory]/mediaplayer.flv
  • Fill in width & height (you chose it in your encoding tool)
  • Put down the path to the .mp4 file
• Copy the resulting code to your web page and test it in a browser

That’s the easiest way to present a video. More sophisticated methods include streaming or configuring the player with JavaScript. You can also add playlists, show a logo and jump to timepoints.

Related Links

•  Here is also a tutorial on how to embed the mediaplayer on your page
  

However I grabbed the stats and prepared the following visualizations giving you an impression on the popularity of those videos in quite impressive numbers (click to see them full size):

Fig. 1 – Number of views

Fig. 2 – Number of ratings

Fig. 3 – Number of comments

Fig. 4 – Number of times favorited

If you want to take a look at the numbers yourself: Find the data here: youtube-top10-2007-data.csv

Some other facts from the press release: In September 2007 9 billions of videos were watched by internet users in the U.S. 3 of 4 U.S. internet users watched at least 1 online video and they watched 181 minutes in average.

While this is surely interesting I’d like to see some figures from other areas and countries too.

• First of all you need to get the actual video from Youtube. Surf to the video you like and dowÅ„load it using e.g. YouTube Downloader. Do not forget to rename yourvideo to .flv.
• Then you will have to convert it to 3gpp. FFMPEG will do the trick. On Linux you might have to compile it yourself (as no AMR and AAC encoder are built in in many precompiled packages). On windows you might use precomiled binaries, e.g. from here.
• Then let ffmpeg do the job for you:
  Windows: ffmpeg.exe -i [video].mov -acodec aac -s 352×288 [video].3gp
  Linux: ffmpeg -i [video].mov -acodec aac -s 352×288 [video].3gp

This command line shown above encodes the video to H263 with a bitrate of 200 kbps and AAC with a bitrate of 64 kbps. The video needs to follow the constraints of 3gpp and is therefore changed to resolution 352×288. This is the maximum possible with 3gpp. Alternatively one can also use the AMR audio codec. But this one has a rather low quality.

A ‘really strange approach’ for those of you running Linux, but not willing to compile: You can run the precompiled Windows with Wine ;-D

The interface is clean and simple. It works like a charm with the Opera mobile browser (not the Opera Mini, I haven’t tried with this also with Opera Mini – tested by Daniel Goldman, thx to Daniel) . The videos are provided with RTSP in 3GP format. So one can also watch the videos using Realplayer (see screenshot). Some further information on the used streaming format: The video I tested was encoded with 40 kbps with H263. Taking a look at the RTSP communication reveals that there is a Darwin Streaming Server working:

Received PLAY response: RTSP/1.0 200 OK
Server: DSS/5.5.3 (Build/489.12; Platform/Linux; Release/Darwin; )

The only thing about mobile YouTube: You’ll need an UMTS connection or better