The long rumored feature of video has arrived to Flickr Tuesday night at 8:30PM Central.
I've gathered the details as Webware, Techcrunch and Wired has outlined:
- 90 second clips maximum - nothing longer initially at least. Think of this as a place to put little clips from your digital camera or camera phone that you wouldn't normally upload to YouTube. Together with the photos they tell a story.
- 150MB size maximum
- Uploads for Pro users only for the time being at least ($25/year for pro membership)
- Anyone can view the videos although you can still control the privacy of the videos like you do with flickr photos. You do this by making the video visible to friends and/or family or public.
- Videos show up alongside photos
- Videos can be shared, embedded individually or as part of sets.
- Video includes tagging, geotagging
- Search videos by tags, and descriptions
- Uploads directly from camera phones.
- Upload from web, uploadr, e-mail or API
- Option to view videos full screen.
- API for third party developers - yeah!
- Licensing options including creative commons.
- Support for English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese.
- 700 kbps
- 12 FPS, keyframe every 12 (fixed)
- Scaled within a 500x500 box with aspect maintained
- Audio is 44.1 kHz, steroe, 44kbps
- 2pass VBR, 700 kbps
- Photostreams are now coined MediaStreams to better describe the collection of photos and video.
To upload your video (if your a Pro Flickr member) head to the web uploader page (uploadr app can't upload video quite yet) and upload your video.
Flickr has a nice long faq on their new Flickr Video feature that is a must read.
Its obvious the point of the flickr videos is to be a "video photo album" with small clips to go along with photos. Certainly not to be a YouTube replacement. For that we already have Yahoo Videos. That being said, who knows where this will lead. I'm sure at some point we could see that 90 second rule laxed and eventually see more of a YouTube-type feature set. I'd expect the uploading capability to be rolled out to free users eventually as well, but for now it's a Pro-flickr exclusive. One thing I've noticed while browsing the sample embedded videos this evening is that there are some slow buffering problems with playback, but that may be because of so many people accessing the very few videos out there at the moment.
Techcrunch and Wired both have announcements on their sites about the flickr video and Webware has a more complete review of the flickr video features that's worth a read while you're waiting to try the site out yourself.
