Some things are so basic, there is just no excuse not to have them. For video-sharing sites, you’d think that a video upload status bar would be a standard feature—a progress bar that shows how much time you have left before your video is uploaded and ready for viewing. Yet YouTube just tells you to “Please Be Patient” while showing you an uploading icon that keeps spinning (see below).
Apparently, it used to show a progress bar, which was taken away. (Perhaps YouTube didn’t want people to realize exactly how slow it takes to upload a video). Now, it may be coming back. While uploading a video today, Peter Ha at CrunchGear noticed a progress bar all of a sudden (screengrab above). I still get the “Please Be Patient” routine, so this might just be a bucket test. I have an email into YouTube asking about this.
It is such a basic feature, though. They really need to bring it back. Maybe the uploads are getting fast enough that YouTube isn’t embarrassed any more to visually highlight how long they take. Anyone else see the upload status bar?
Update: The feature is in beta. You can check it out here. And I’ve been able to confirm that YouTube will eventually roll out the feature to all users.
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heh
Retards
OMG Who cares?
I cannot believe that Erick actually bothers writing a post about a progress bar in YouTube. Am I missing something here?
Erick, I’ve got a tip for you. Yahoo changed the toolbar colour in Yahoo Groups from cyan to green. Maybe worth a post about the changing RGB values of Yahoo. OMG.
I’m only covering Google and YouTube because they pay me under the table. I thought you figured it by now. Yahoo just doesn’t fork out the cash.
… Wait, please. Nothing substantial yet, I promise I will write my next comment in very proper English, so it sounds important. Then, I will ask Michael Arrington to block comments that upset me…
Now, the consensus is that YouTube will excel at its monetizing activities in the next 3 weeks, in such a manner that Microsoft, an up-and-coming outfit from Seattle, will become extremely concerned regarding its future financial outlook.
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Yeah. Sounds like a great way. To be honest, I think YouTube is one of the worst designed web 2.0 sites out there, and all my friends say the same. Needs alot more work than just a progress bar.
But what it does is amazing. Facebook & Youtube – the best two apps.
Gmail recently added it for attachments. I think they are applying similar GUI standards across all properties. Good to know a company this big still so agile.
“realize exactly how slow its uploads take”
Now that is some interesting grammar right there! Almost a meme!
made it clearer
Wow, sorry Erick, my bad! Must been hit by the old selective dyslexia, I didn’t see the ’s’ and read it as “realize exactly how slow it uploads take”..
Promise to proof twice next time!
Why would they remove this (except for slow upload speeds)? Doesn’t make sense.
If you’ve ever programmed any sort of status progress bar, it is nearly impossible to get it efficient and accurate. So your statement, “somethings are so basic” is a little misguided, it is basic to do a crappy upload bar, it is complex to do one that is excellent. See windows file copying progress bars as proof of the crappy variety. Officespace also provides a great demo of this as well.
Looks like they may have got it right.
That’s not my problem as a consumer. That’s for YouTube’s engineers’ to figure out. They have enough of them.
It’s not THAT hard if you build the back-end right. Problem is probably that they didn’t take into consideration the size of files they would have to deal with..
Just counting and representing crc, blocks and data is not rocket science.
I agree with Erick.
It doesn’t even have to be accurate – just make sure the bar fills up when the upload is done. Most ppl just want to see a moving bar, even if its not a true reflection of how the upload is going.
I’ve done one, and it’s not that hard… especially not in YouTube’s case – you have a fixed file size, and you just show a bar to indicate how many bytes of that file is uploaded!
Technically, the only thing that you can consider slightly difficult is estimating how much time is remaining… but even then – it’s not exactly rocket science
I think it’s a great idea. Gmail has introduced on their client now as well
this is huge news – i hope it hits digg or gets a retweet.
They may have been using flash to handle uploads before. Even if you didn’t see a single flash object on the page, it still could have been using flash, which provides progress events. If this was the case (invisible flash component), flash 10 would have hosed them and maybe they just released their workaround / new implementation.
The status bar has been on and off on Youtube, but I really don’t see why this is a big deal… Could you explain?
Slow news day Erick???
Amazing amount of conversation around non-news. Just like real conversations, the topic wanders.
Should we talk about sports next?
A good feature, that they should’ve added a long time ago. Drives me nuts waiting for a video to upload – when I have no idea when it’ll be done.
It seems like they change the upload stat bar more often than most would change their underwear. To predict what they will do in the near future is pointless.
WOW YouTube added a status bar!!! It’s big news!
This appears to be a Flash-based uploader which can provide file progress, batch uploading and so on. Browsers’ native file support (some pending HTML 5 enhancements aside) is pretty limited, so Flash comes in handy as an interim solution.
Libraries such as YUI and SWFUpload make it easier for developers to get a “flashier” upload experience. Flickr (which I work on) uses the YUI uploader component for its primary web-based upload UI.
Upload progress in the browser is not trivial. Flash makes it a lot easier. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see my web site not the only ones having issues with upload progress
Techcrunch never bothered to cover us, but we’re doing fine. Even in a down economy. No VC funding required.
LOL
This must be the stupidest post ever. Next we’ll see posts about how facebook added and extra “space” after a person’s name.
they did?
I just noticed that Google also added a status bar for uploading files as attachments to emails in gmail.
It’s official. TechCrunch has hit rock bottom.
Hey, Miva, one of the first online PPC ad networks, just got bought — wonder why something like that doesn’t make it on TechCrunch but the return of a loading bar does…
give these guys a break. i think it’s interesting that they brought it back. it’s a very simple thing to impliment and i should be there. i hate watching that stupid spinning deal. i would much rather know about how much time i have left.
It is simple to implement from a user interface perspective. However, at the server level, at the scale that YouTube operates, I’m sure it is a significantly complex piece of engineering.
YouTube seems to be testing a pay per download feature, look at this screenshot:
http://www.flic...ron/3352976342/
“Download this video ($0.99)”
Wow insightful “journalism”. I thought since Arrington was back there’d be a little more care about what was written about on TC. I guess he’s still “out”.
lmao. This is beta feature XD
Testing and research is the only way to compete from the ,market.Though Youtube have a very large userbase but Vimeo is emerging as a little competitor.
Isn’t it?
Retardssss…
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Wow, stop the presses.
Upload videos using Picasa already has the status bar.
I noticed this progress bar. For sure, the time that takes to upload a video is too slow.
Much more valuable would be a progress bar indicating how far along their servers are in PROCESSING your videos once they are uploaded. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it can take hours. It would be great to know when you can expect your video to go live.
Erm…
When you click on Upload, there’s a link that says Try out the beta uploader. If you click there, you’ll get the progress bar.
That’s what your friend did. I’ve been using the beta uploader for weeks now.
It’s now over 3 hours and Youtube hasn’t finished uploading my 17.3MB video!