The Best Smartphone for Uploading Media to Facebook
New Apps to Postal service Videos With Ease
Nigh of the video shot in the world today is recorded on mobile phones. That annoying guy who walked around parties with a camcorder has been replaced with an army of annoying people who whip out their phones to capture the moment.
Yet almost none of the millions of video clips stored on smartphones end upward online.
The reason is simple: information technology's easy to pull out your telephone, retrieve the camera, and press record. But sharing your video is harder. How practise you put information technology on Facebook? Some mobile Facebook apps take a video upload feature, but most people haven't found information technology.
Phones that take a congenital-in choice to post video to YouTube can force you through a heed-numbing multistep process. Kickoff, you upload the prune, which can't be more than 15 minutes long. Then, y'all look upwardly to 20 minutes for YouTube to catechumen information technology and make it available. Then, you lot have to copy and paste the URL into Facebook or email. It sounds easy in theory, but in practice it's enough to proceed nigh people from bothering.
If you try to send a video directly to a friend via e-mail or text bulletin, you'll about certainly be thwarted. Either the prune is too big to transport, or it's as well big for them to receive, or when they click it, they'll just go an unhelpful error bulletin like "the media being played is of an unsupported format."
That's why most of us resort to sharing video by belongings our phones in front of other people's faces.
In the final few weeks, though, new mobile apps have begun to brand it almost as like shooting fish in a barrel to share a video every bit it is to shoot. Past automating the upload process, tying into Facebook and Twitter and reformatting clips and so that they play on multiple types of phones also every bit computers, these apps aim to make cellphone video as ubiquitous as still photos.
The most talked-about video app is Socialcam, a free app for iPhone and Android models that, as its proper noun says, incorporates social media into the mix. To get started, download Socialcam from Apple'due south App Store for iPhones or Google's Android Market place. The first time you burn down it up, it will prompt you lot to log in using your Facebook business relationship. Once you're in, shoot-and-share is a lot easier than earlier.
You can use Socialcam to record video, or import clips from your photographic camera roll. At that place'due south no limit on how long your clip tin can be. Yous don't need to think virtually uploading, considering Socialcam automatically uploads the prune to its own servers in the background, and shares them from there. (The app is made past Justin.tv, a San Francisco start-up that popularized the genre of live video feeds a few years ago.)
Once you lot're done recording, you accept six options for sharing: Facebook, Twitter, SMS, due east-mail, Tumblr and Posterous. You tin can post to your Facebook feed, or y'all can enter a Twitter user proper noun and password to tweet a link to your video, which will play in any browser that supports the flash thespian or HTML5 video standard — that would include most desktop computers these days, and a growing array of mobile gadgets.
If you'd rather not share your prune with the entire Internet, you can electronic mail a link to one or more contacts from your smartphone's accost book. Again, if they're using a computer or phone that plays HTML5 video, information technology'll play in the recipients' browser. Socialcam besides has its own social network in which you lot can tag, similar and comment on friends' Socialcam clips, which the app lets yous browse in a gallery. If someone else tags you in a Socialcam video, it will get posted on your wall in Facebook. Yes, y'all can untag yourself.
Video uploads are expert for more than party clips, date-hunting and "I'm at the beach and you're non" messages. Real estate agents have begun to use them for walk-throughs of homes on the market. Protesters and counterprotesters at Wisconsin's statehouse used them to document Gov. Scott Walker'due south boxing with public employee unions. Office workers have captured business organisation meetings with less product quality, simply as well less bad-mannered formality, than an official videographer.
Simply in many cases, the intended viewers may be trying to scout on a telephone and not at their desks. Not all mobile phones tin can handle flash or HTML5 yet.
Another gratis app for iPhones, Thwapr (pronounced "THWAP-er"), solves the unsupported video format trouble automatically. Thwapr video clips will play on hundreds of models of phones.
Similar Socialcam, you point and shoot with Thwapr. And so you lot can send it to another phone owner or postal service to Facebook or Twitter, although Thwapr doesn't have Socialcam'due south tagging features.
Thwapr's magic play tricks, though, is that if yous send a Thwapr clip via e-mail or text message, you lot usually need not worry about what kind of phone your recipients are packing. They'll get a link to click. When they do, their phone will request the video from Thwapr, which figures out what model of telephone they have and how best to serve video to that phone. That includes automatically converting the video's information format, which takes near 5 seconds.
Thwapr has a couple of restrictions. For at present, the video recording app works only on iPhones, although the visitor says information technology is planning an Android app. Video uploads are limited to 10 minutes in length if you're sending it over AT&T or Verizon, or 45 minutes if you're connected to a Wi-Fi network.
A tertiary free app, Qik Video Connect (it's pronounced quick, and is owned by Skype, makers of the Internet phone and video chat software), offers solutions for 2 of the shortcomings in Socialcam and Thwapr. Get-go, there are Qik apps for recording video on a wide range of smartphones, non just iPhone and Android. They're not as slick as Qik's latest iPhone version, which has an easy-to-figure-out interface, but they'll do the job.
2nd, Qik was originally built for live video streaming. As it turns out, most users near e'er adopt not to circulate alive on the Cyberspace, but to record now and post subsequently. Still, Qik makes it easy to create a video mail service on Facebook that looks and plays like a prerecorded clip, just is actually connected alive to your phone's camera. Qik's iPhone app includes hooks for bloggers and self-publishers to create alive or prerecorded video links on most of the popular blog platforms, or in an R.S.S. feed. Setting these up isn't as easy as posting to Facebook, but any serious blogger should be able to figure them out in a few minutes.
I more than thing you should do: trim your videos to the interesting parts. Qik and Thwapr have editing built in. Socialcam lets you import a prune edited in Apple'south iMovie or VidTrim on Android. Other video offset-ups have found that most people won't pay attention for longer than ten or 12 seconds.
If you're going to outset posting videos from your phone, call back earlier y'all shoot. Y'all don't want to become the Internet version of the older archetype: the guy who bores everyone with his never-ending home movies.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/technology/personaltech/05basics.html
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