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Google Videos is a free video sharing website and also a video search engine from Google Inc. Google Videos allows selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provides the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube. This allows for websites to host large amounts of video remotely on Google Videos without running into bandwidth or storage capacity issues.
The service was launched on January 25, 2005.[1] On October 9, 2006 Google bought former competitor YouTube. Google announced on June 13, 2007 that the Google Videos search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, in YouTube and user uploads.[2] Search result links now open a frameset with a Google Videos header at the top, and the original player page below it, similar to the way the Google Images search results are presented. In 2009, Google discontinued the ability to upload videos to Google's web servers.[3]
Video content
Google Videos is geared towards providing a large archive of freely searchable videos. Besides amateur media, Internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aims to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies.
A number of educational discourses by Google employees have been recorded and made available for viewing via Google Videos. The lectures have been done mainly at the employees' former universities. The topics cover Google technologies and software engineering but also include other pioneering efforts by major players in the software engineering field.
Various media companies offered content on Google Videos for purchase, including CBS programs, NBA, music videos, and independent film. Initially, the content of a number of broadcasting companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN) was available as free streaming content or stills with closed captioning. In addition, the U.S. National Archive used Google Videos to make historic films available online, but this project was later discontinued.[4]
Google Videos also searches other non-affiliated video sites from web crawls. Sites searched by Google Videos in addition to their own videos and YouTube include GoFish, ExposureRoom, Vimeo, MySpace, Biku, and Yahoo! Video. It appears that Google Videos is moving away from an online video archive and toward a search engine for videos, similar to their web and image searches.
As of August 2007, the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program ended. Users who previously purchased a video from Google Videos were no longer able to view them. Credits for users were made available as values for Google Checkout and were valid for 60 days.
Google Video Player
As of August 17, 2007, Google Video Player has been discontinued and is no longer available for download from the Google Videos website. The option to download videos in GVI format has also been removed, the only format available being iPod/PSP (MP4 format).Google Video Player was another way to view Google videos; it ran on Windowsand Mac OS X. The Google Video Player plays back files in Google's own Google Video File (.gvi) media format and supported playlists in "Google Video Pointer" (.gvp) format. When users downloaded to their computers, the resulting file used to be a small .gvp (pointer) file rather than a .gvi file. When run, the .gvp file would download a .gvi (movie) file to the user's default directory.
While early versions of Google's in-browser video player code were based on the open source VLC Media Player, the last version of Google Video Player was not based on VLC, according to its readme file. However, it did include the OpenSSLcryptographic toolkit and some libraries from the Qt widget toolkit.[9]
[edit]GVI format and conversion
Google Video Files (.gvi), and latterly its .avi files, are modified Audio Video Interleave (.avi) files that have an extra list containing the FourCC "goog" immediately following the header. The list can be removed with a hex editor to avoid playback issues with various video players.[10][11] The video is encoded in MPEG-4 ASP alongside an MP3 audio stream. MPEG-4 video players can render .gvi Google Video Files without format conversion (after changing the extension from .gvi to .avi, although this method of just renaming the file extension does not work with videos purchased with DRM to inhibit unauthorized copying. Among other software VirtualDub is able to read .gvi files and allows the user to convert them into different formats of choice. There are also privately developed software solutions, such as GVideo Fix, that can convert them to .avi format without recompression. MEncoder with "-oac copy -ovc copy" as parameters also suffices.
Criticisms
Google Videos has little organization of content and no noticeable pricing scheme.[13][14] However, pay content (available currently in the United States only) is arranged in a few categories. A video ranking in the form of a Top 100 has been introduced and the official Google Video Blog features "Google Picks" (videos considered noteworthy by Google) on a regular basis. "Google Picks" are currently also available via the Google Videos homepage.
The strategy for Google Videos has shifted dramatically from an initial focus on digitizing offline content, akin to Google BookSearch, to then later focusing on fee-based downloads akin to iTunes, to then later focusing on social networking features akin to YouTube.[citation needed]Despite constant product development and business development churn, Google Videos had never attained market leadership in the online video space at the time when Google acquired YouTube.[citation needed]
Google Videos currently doesn't display the username under which videos on the service were uploaded.
AVI and MP4
Besides GVI and Flash Video, Google provided its content through downloadable Audio Video Interleave (.avi) and MPEG-4 (.mp4) video files. Not all formats are available through the website's interface, however, depending on the user's operating system.
Where available, Google's "save as" function for Windows/Mac produced an .avi file, while the "save as" function for iPod and PSP produced an .mp4 file.
The .avi file is not in standard AVI format. To play the file in a popular media player such as Winamp or Windows Media Player, the file must first be modified using a hex editor to delete the first LIST block in the file header, which starts at byte 12 (000C hex, first byte in file is byte 0) and ends at byte 63 (003F hex).[10][11] Optionally, the file length (in bytes 4 to 7, little endian) should then be amended by subtracting 52 (3F hex - 0C hex = 33 hex).
Winamp and Windows Media Player cannot play the unmodified .avi file because the non-standard file header corrupts the file. However,Media Player Classic, MPlayer and the VLC Media Player will play the unmodified .avi file, and the Google .mp4 file. Media Player Classic only if an MPEG-4 DirectShow Filter such as ffdshow is installed. Most Linux media players xine, Totem, the Linux version of the VLC Media Player and Kaffeine have no problems with Google's .avi.
An .mp4 file will play in Winamp if an MPEG-4/H.264 DirectShow Filter such as ffdshow and an MP4 Splitter such as Haali are installed, and the extension ;MP4 is added to the Extension List in the Winamp DirectShow decoder configuration.
As of Spring 2008, the option to download files in .AVI format has been removed, and files are only available as Flash video or .MP4, while the same videos when accessed through the companion YouTube.com site are available only in Flash video format.
[Third-party download services
Google offers users the means to save only some of the videos on the site, mostly for copyright reasons. Their documentation goes so far as to claim that only these videos can be downloaded. However, since viewing a video requires downloading it to the computer, their software merely makes it an inconvenience to save downloaded videos on the computer. A number of solutions to this problem, including external software and bookmarklets, have been developed.
Reference : Google.com {offcourse}
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