More Video Tools - Grouper V2.0 Rocks

In my opinion, any video company that wants success in the Web2.0 space needs open formats and cross-platform software. Grouper may set a new standard in terms of functionality, but should also covet for these two things - which they don’t right now.

WMV is almost as closed as a format can be, and not everyone uses windows. A p2p application for the sake of being another p2p application will not cut it for me, and the feature set doesn’t make me jump the barrier of installing and downloading.

I tried Groouper, and I can say that it sucks bigtime. It surely doesnt work as advertised. Hell, I don’t understand why it uses all those funny memory hogging skins.

Why can’t I get a skype type cool looking app that “works as said”

-Jive

What about vidilife or evideoshare?

( http://www.vidilife.com/ )

or

( http://www.evideoshare.com/ )

have you checked these out as well? After taking a peek at egrouper, it seems to have an edit feature that the others may not.. useful I suppose for videophone type quick uploads on the road I guess… I prefer to edit with my own stuff, but I could see a use for the egrouper editing oncein a while.. perhaps the others will add this.. Everyone is vieing for people’s videos, even google… kind of cool.. hope ther becomes a storage limit war like the one that made yahoo raise it’s email storage limit to match gmail’s…

if it doesn’t work on linux or mac then why consider it “web2.0″? are tags and rss feeds enough to claim _openness_? is user driven content already the entry card to the web2.0 camp? we need a list of K.O. criteria, or better, some kind of W3C web2.0 validator… a bunch of VC money is not enough to build open standards.

Grouper… seems more like a porn site to me. Click on the “Adults” tag on their homepage. You’ll get a show. Funny. They may want to exclude that tag from public view.

Kudos to these guys for pushing some real innovation in the clip sharing space. That said, in my experience, you lose 95% of the audience when you require users to make the upfront investment of a download. And with Ajax, I would argue that that is an unnecessary bar.

You should definitely check out vSocial (http://www.vsocial.com), which was covered in your original post on the Flickrs of Video.

Our key value proposition, beyond making video clip sharing just work, is providing web based tools that enable users to actually “do something” with video.

So, for example, in the vSocial scheme of things, if you embedded a clip on your blog, you will see a meta layer that enables you to see how this clip was tagged by vSocial members, see what comments were made about it by them, and email the clip to friends in a click — all without going to another site.

Plus we provide a tool called a video roll that enables users to tell short stories (e.g., favorite horror movies) using an amalgam of clips.

Again, all browser based, and you can even create full posts on clips to Blogger and TypePad using our WYSIWYG Blog It! editor.

To get a quickie primer on this and see-touch-feel what I am talking about, check out the post that we wrote on the topic called “Short attention, short conversations and video clips” (http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2005/10/vsocial_video_c.html).

It has both examples embedded in the post.

Better yet, check out the site yourself, and in five minutes, it should be clear that we’ve nailed it from a usability, utility and workflow perspective.

The site is growing like a weed.

Mark

vsocial.com is pretty slick.

Hmm… they’ve improved the loading time. It used to take just ages and I dropped it. But I’m not sure I can say the same for their new design. The website is better but the app is less friendly. I still prefer web based services for video over desktop ones that require you to stay connected and are mem hogs.

Grouper has some nice and flexible options - but an app that uses over 100 mb of valuable RAM just for sharing videos is no option for me…

Michael,

I have to give this a thumbs down as well. A forced install of .NET? Highly unreliable download speeds? Incompatible with most browsers and alternative operating systems? WMV?! Good lord, you’d think this was a Microsoft product. Given Aviv Eyal’s background it practically is.

I agree that the features grouper promises are tantalizing, but the cost is too great for this product. (Ironic No?)

-Ian

I love this product; easy to use; great flexibility and features….design is fantastic!

This is Aviv, CTO of Grouper. So you guys are a tough crowd but I welcome suggestions to improve Grouper. We will try and tackle some of the issues raised above.

Video File Format
We support sharing video in the most common video file formats including Windows Media, AVIs and QuickTime and we are adding more formats. We use Windows Media Video for streaming video on Grouper.com. Contrary to common belief, alternative video formats with equivalent capabilities such as AVC, MP4/AAC and Flash Video 8 are proprietary as well and some of them involve non-trivial costs for encoding, decoding or streaming. We use MP4/AAC for iTunes and for the Sony PSP.

Windows Only
Grouper is not Windows only. The full functionality of Grouper.com is available on Mac OS X using Safari or Firefox and you can download any video shared on Grouper and play it with iTunes or using the QuickTime Player, and you easily move it to the Video iPod or the Sony PSP, all on the Mac. The only thing that doesn’t work on the Mac is private and public sharing. We are a small team and had to start with the largest market but look for a Mac OS X client soon. Even all-mighty Google is only offering its desktop apps to Windows only. Our networking code ports fairly easily but the UI and built-in relational desktop database is more complex to port and we know how demanding Mac users are. BTW, we are actively looking for strong Mac developers that are up to the task and we’d love to hear from you if working on Grouper for Mac OS X sounds like your next dream job.

Memory Hog
Grouper is not a memory hog. There’s a common misconception about the .Net memory manager. Unlike unmanaged native code, and like all garbage collected systems, the .Net runtime dynamically allocates more memory to .Net apps than is actually being used by the application when there is extra RAM available to improve performance. If another application in the system should require some of this additional memory, the .NET framework will notice this and relinquish it so it can be used elsewhere. Grouper’s working set is smaller than many popular native desktop applications. Google Desktop Search is such an example. Minimize Grouper and you will see the memory used drops to under 5MB. That being said we can and will be more efficient with precious memory and we keep optimizing the client to make better use of PC resources.

Porn
We do our best to prevent obscene material from being shared on Grouper. One user shared a ton of porn yesterday and was banned from sharing on Grouper. Just like Yahoo Groups, there is an adult area in our groups directory. We felt it would be better to channel the adult content into a special area than fight the constant battle. The groups are still private and represent only a fraction of the groups in the directory.

Video Editing
Our vision is to bring video editing to the masses not to budding professionals. To do that we had to make it fun and easy. Importing, editing and sharing has never been so intuitive. We are not trying to replace advanced editing software such as Pinnacle or Adobe Premiere. We chose simplicity over complex advanced features and the results are good so far – over 30,000 files were shared on Grouper.com yesterday.

Vsocial and other video hosting sites
We are always flattered when competitors are critical of Grouper in comments to reviews/articles etc. It means we are getting their attention. We have built a hybrid hosting/P2P model. You don’t need our client to stream videos on our web site. We store the first 3 minutes and you can download the original high quality full-length version using our client and its distributed P2P file transfer capabilities. The client includes a state-of-the-art file sharing infrastructure that is similar to bit-torrent and eDonkey in terms of capabilities. P2P also enables us to offer ad-free downloads to your desktop, iPod Video, Sony PSP and more. Since downloads cost us nothing, we pass those savings on to our users. We also leverage a desktop client for editing because desktop software is better for editing large media files, working with local files, and using the PC multimedia APIs and capabilities. Sharing with Grouper’s client is effortless since you can share folders, batch encode and tag. Also, since the encoding occurs locally, the upload time is dramatically shorter. We know that our client kicks ass for sharing because in just 24 hours since launch, 30,000 files have already been shared in our public directory.

Our approach to sharing video is focused on simplicity from device to device.
• Complete Video Service: Capture, edit, share and watch video with the audience of your choice - friends, family and the world. 2/3s of digital camera owners surveyed said this was necessary for them to begin sharing video online. Before Grouper you needed three types of software.
• No limits on sharing: Share an unlimited number of videos of UNLIMITED size on the web and via P2P. Hybrid hosted/P2P model is low cost and scalable. Every video site limits size and some like YouTube have also announced or have already moved to paid usage. 200,000 simultaneous viewers of video at 250Kbps will require a 50 Gig pipe.
• Video to go: Stream or download all shared videos to your desktop, iPod, PSP, etc. and take it with you. Remix your favorite videos downloaded from Grouper and re-share them. Mobile media devices are the hottest selling consumer products this holiday season (NYT).
• Integrated social MEDIA network: Media is the focus with social networking as a feature. Build a media profile, subscribe to a member’s public media as a video podcast (PSP or iPod), a media RSS feed or via a film strip which can be added to any web page. Every one of our users that shares video becomes a channel that you can receive via media RSS, Video PodCasting or the Web.

Hey,

I have been playing with this and it allows for pic albums and video except it’s .flv which most people would not be able to create. This could be on its way to being flicker for movies, but have pictures as well.

Regarding the last comment, Grouper is currently not creating .flv files. It uses Flash for Film strips. A Film strip is a very small (~30k) RSS Media enabled thumbnails player of media shared by a user, matching a search term, a tag or a category that can be embedded in blogs, websites and social networks profile pages. More info here: http://grouper.com/support/faq.aspx

To the two clowns from vSocial and Grouper:

Do you always spamvertise on blogs? It’s bad etiquette.

Your “applications” and “services” are generally filled with boring trash for the young teenager. Congratulations! You’ll probably get bought out by a megacorp interested in selling advertisements to the kiddies.

Perhaps in the future, you can also incorporate the concept of quality in your offerings. Reward it. Punish trash. That’ll start becoming more worth while.

http://en.cciptv.com/p2p-strea.....loads.aspx

CCIPTV Live Podcaster, typical of new P2P Live Podcaster, can realize the function of podcasting, sending the local audio and video files and signals from television card, compression card, collection card, PC camera, microphone to the Internet, which makes you to set up your own Internet TV station only on a common PC. Meanwhile, this software can play such formats as rm、rmvb、mpeg、mpg、mpeg4、avi、wmv、wma、mp3、DVD and even transit all the Internet TV programs of different formats.