Video link: Mothers Day DriveThe new blog software suggests that it has the facility to add video to a blog post. That’s true … within limits. Video files are generally huge. For instance, this afternoon we took a drive to see what birds might be found (a Nina passion). I took a few pictures, then used iPhoto (a Mac program) to make a slideshow and then GarageBand (another Mac program) to record an audio track to go with it. When it was finished, the final file size was more than 56 megabytes. The server software won’t allow files that large to be uploaded, and even if it did, it would take about twenty minutes to upload and that long to download again to anyone that wanted to see the movie. While the image size (640 x 480) is a nice size to view, the file is just simply too big.

My next step was to run the move through QuickTime Pro and export it as a smaller picture (320 x 288). That reduced the file size to 21 megabytes. Still too large to be uploaded to this web server. The upload and download times are more reasonable … about 8 minutes to upload or download, but still too long for most people to wait.

Finally, I exported it as a movie MP-4 file. That was a much more reasonable 2.4 megabytes with upload and download times of about 2 minutes. This time I uploaded the file to Amazon Web Services and set the file to start playing as soon as enough of the file had been downloaded. That’s a nice feature of MP-4 files.

So, what’s the best method of putting a video on a blog on my servers? Put the file on YouTube and link to the file on your blog. It works well. If you have questions on how to do that, give me a call and I’ll show you the process.

We had a nice day today and I succeeded in exceeding Nina’s expectations for Mother’s Day. Perhaps she’ll write about it on her blog…. Meanwhile, Happy Mother’s Day!