Easy Ways to Share Home Video, Worthy or Not
His name is Earl.
He's my dog -- and now a somewhat reluctant but worldwide video star.
This week Earl became a pioneering participant in three Web-based services that allow users to share their videos with family members, friends and even a global public.
This is not the place for us to debate whether home movies are the highlight of holiday gatherings or the worst thing your friends could ever foist on you. But websites Grouper.com, YouTube.com and, perhaps inevitably, Google.com -- in world-domination mode -- contain enough humorous, weird and just plain interesting videos to merit checking them out.
And you can add your own for others to delight in or snicker at.
Sharing services for still photos have been on the Web since the late 1990s, but it took longer for the online world to be ready for video. The main obstacle -- besides the fact that the highly photogenic Earl was not yet born -- was that video digital files are far larger, requiring much more time to upload and download.
"We had to get to the point where more people had broadband," said Josh Felser, chief executive of Grouper Networks Inc., which introduced video software for its file-sharing service Dec. 7.
There's another factor behind the arrival of the three video-sharing sites: the increasing availability of video modes on digital still cameras. Felser said most of the more than 70,000 video clips that had been uploaded to Grouper came from still cameras.
"Now that you can buy a digital camera for less than $300 that can take TV-quality video, a lot more people are experimenting with it," he said.
Grouper's downloadable, free software allows subscribers to add titles and simple effects, and it prepares clips for uploading. The software is easy to use, even for a video novice like myself, but it's available only for computers with the Windows XP operating system.
The other services -- from YouTube Inc., which also launched this month, and Google Inc.'s project, which has been out for public testing since June -- allow clips to be uploaded directly to their sites. So they work with other versions of Windows, as well with Apple Macintosh computers.
If you've been following along, you've probably already asked this question: Doesn't video sharing on the Internet open a big Pandora's box -- amateur porn? After all, pornography has helped fuel the proliferation of Internet services and features.
