Digital video update: YouTube, flash, high-definition.

I last devoted an entire column to new developments in video technologies in May, 1998. At that time, I wrote about such new developments as the DVD, MPEG-2, and HDTV ("high-definition TV"--slated for first broadcasts in the US later in 1998). Today, the next-generation DVD standard has split into two competing formats (Blu-Ray and HD DVD), compression algorithms for digital video have advanced enormously, and US TV viewers are still waiting for the full rollout of HDTV. The big buzz recently about video has been something quite different: the enormous boom in the popularity of Internet sites such as YouTube for sharing video clips. We will explore in this column these and other developments in digital video and what they might mean for language learning.

YOUTUBE AND VIDEO SHARING

Over the past year YouTube has become enormously popular. A recent article in Wired cites an average of 65,000 uploads and 100 million videos viewed per day on YouTube. One might mention as further evidence the purchase of YouTube by Google for the amount of US $1.65 billion. The Wired article explores some examples of the wide variety of video content available on the site. Simply surfing through YouTube gives ample examples of that diversity. What is common to most clips is that they are amateur videos which document occurrences from the lives of non-celebrities. As such, the clips provide a huge multimedia library of real language use by real people, a potentially rich resource for language learning or corpus collections. The vast majority of clips are in English, and a number of ESL/EFL teachers have begun tapping into this source. While some provide sample lessons for students to view and discuss, others have uploaded videos of their own, with the specific goal of language learning in mind. Instructors of other languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese and Indonesian, have also found YouTube to be useful in language learning.

One of the differences between YouTube and other social networking sites [see a recent LLT column] is that it does not feature community tagging. Rather, the user posting the video supplies the tags. As is the case in most social networking sites, there are no prescribed, or even recommended, content tags. This makes searching for particular kinds of video clips or specific content very much a hit or miss enterprise. Searching on "Teaching English," for example, returns hundreds of results, most of them clips of teachers in action or class profiles, but the hit list also includes commercials that could be used in teaching English, as well as clips from commercial providers of language instruction. As with all clips on YouTube, clips in this category vary greatly in video professionalism, length, audio quality, and interest level for folks other than those directly involved as camera operators or subjects. Quite a few group projects from language classes are posted to YouTube as a method of sharing and publicizing. Some of the clips uploaded are just slideshows or videos shot with a static camera; others, however, are quite sophisticated in the use of lighting, captioning, camera angles, and transitions. Many come with a music soundtrack, often using commercially available songs, which for the time being some copyright holders (i.e. record companies) are allowing to be used in this way. The murky permission issues in the incorporation of copyrighted audio and video in uploaded clips to YouTube result in some clips being suddenly pulled from the site. This makes problematic any reliance on the availability of particular clips for instructional purposes.

Uploading video clips to YouTube is a quick and easy process and works in similar ways on other video sharing sites. Video clips can be in avi, mov, or mpg formats (MPEG4 is recommended) and be a maximum of ten minutes long. At least one content tag is required, along with a specification of the language used in the clip, presently restricted to a choice among English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, or German. Clips can also be uploaded directly from a digital camera or a PDA, as long as they are connected to the Internet. Video can even be directly uploaded to YouTube from a WebCam. Once uploaded, the file is converted to the Flash video format used for all clips. The URL is displayed to the uploader, along with the HTML code to paste into a Web page in order to display the video on one's own page. The ease with which anyone is able to upload video clips to sites such as YouTube, along with the popularity of shooting videos on cell phones or digital cameras has enabled the video sharing frenzy the US is currently experiencing. What also has contributed to this development is the rapid growth in broadband Internet connections in the US, as well as the increase in processor speeds in computers, making video editing and format conversion/compression significantly faster. This has been accompanied by the availability of inexpensive yet powerful video editing tools such as iMovie for the Macintosh or Jumpcut, Videoegg, or Eyespot for Windows. These products have specific tools for creating videos to be delivered in a Web browser. One of the most significant enabling technologies for the new video Internet age is the Flash video format, which is quickly becoming the format of choice for video on the Web, used by YouTube as well as by Google Video, MySpace, and many other sites.

FLASH VIDEO TAKES OFF

Flash video (flv) is popular largely due to its relatively small file size, interactive capabilities, and progressive downloading (with video playing before the entire clip is downloaded). Other video formats share this last feature, but they do not provide the interactive options available through Flash. They also are not as universal as Flash player, which has greater presence on personal computers than the players for Real, QuickTime or Windows Media. In contrast to video in other formats, which often is played in a dedicated external player, Flash video is normally embedded directly into the Web page. The advanced compression scheme in the latest version of Flash, along with progressive downloading, provides reasonably fast video playback at reasonably good quality without the need for a dedicated media server. There is also a streaming Flash video server, called Flash Video Server. Flash video has been in use for some time by media outlets, along with other video formats, but it is only in the past year that the popularity of YouTube has made Flash video so ubiquitous on the Web.

Flash has been around for some time, beginning with the initial release in 1996 of "FutureSplash Animator", designed as software for drawing and animation, using vector and raster graphics. Version 3 in 1998 added the ability to import audio and video, and version 5 in 2000 introduced ActionScript, a scripting language similar to JavaScript. It is this later addition that has made Flash into a powerful multimedia authoring tool. This allows, for example, video to be scriptable, so that it can respond to user actions such as mouse clicks, or to be overlaid with text or other objects. The most recent version of Flash also supports alpha transparency, which allows for multiple layers of video. Authoring is based on a timeline model, similar to Macromedia Director. Most of the interactivity in Flash movies (buttons, text entry fields, pick list, drag and drop) is created using ActionScript. The programmability of Flash offers the most important distinction to other video formats on the Web.

Since version 7 (2004), Flash has also had XML capabilities, which allow for on-the-fly incorporation of XML data in Flash movies within a Web browser. There is also the ability to store and retrieve persistent data through the use of "Flash cookies". Adobe (which acquired Flash from Macromedia) has also developed and released "Flex" (now at version 2.0), a development environment which is designed to build rich Internet applications based on Flash. Flex uses an XML-based language called MXML and comes with components and features that make it possible, and relatively easy, to add Web services, drag and drop, sortable columns and other advanced features to Flash-based Web pages. Flex seems poised to challenge Java as a programming option for interactive Web applications.

The capabilities of the latest version of Flash makes it on its own a powerful tool for development of browser-based applications, similar to AJAX. However, unlike AJAX, Flash is a proprietary technology, not open source (although there are several open source projects involving Flash). Use of Flash also requires a browser plug-in, which although very widely installed--estimates gives the percentage of Flash browser penetration from 90 to 98%--still is not something developers can automatically count on a user having installed, particularly not in the most up-to-date version of the player. While Flash is cross-platform, and versions exist for playback on Windows, Macintosh and Linux, alternative and mobile browsers do not necessarily support Flash playback, although Flash Lite is available for some cell phones and other devices. Another concern some users have with Flash is its frequent aggressive and intrusive use in online advertising, leading to the development of tools such as Flashblock, designed to allow users to more easily designate which Flash content they wish to view.