VideoEgg: Posting videos in your blog made super easy…

What is it?

If you think VideoEgg is just another new addition to the whole online video hosting service bandwagon (YouTube, Google Video etc.), think twice !! VideoEgg has tackled the long standing problem of “getting the video off your camera & uploading it to a site” and provided an extremely easy solution for it.

Instead of sifting through a maze of applications supporting a wide variety of obscure video formats / codecs to achieve the above-mentioned task, VideoEgg provides you with a simple 3 step approach to sharing your video with the rest of the world. For this you need to install a small 3MB package called VideoEggPublisher, which you can download from their site once you’ve signed up with them. Once installed this tool will run right inside your browser and allow you to…

1. Grab the video directly from your DV camera / webcam onto your computer. Pre-existing video files can also be added by simply dragging the file and dropping it onto this application. It even supports addition of videos stored on mobile devices by simply mailing out to a pre-defined email address.
2. Auto-encode the video in a format suitable for playing on web-sites (Flash Video) using the embedded VideoEgg player. Since the Flash plug-in is installed in almost any given browser, none of your visitors should have a problem viewing your videos.
3. Click the Upload button to add it to your online video library at VideoEgg and get the HTML / JavaScript code to display it at your site.All this is done using a transparent process that’s extremely easy for even beginners to grasp. Their interface very minimalistic and has the exact tools / options required to perform these tasks – no more, no less.

Features

All videos you upload are automatically added to a folder called My Library on their server. Before you add the video to your personal library, you’re given the option to add a Title and a Description to it. You can also make the video publicly accessible by clicking a checkbox. While this feature isn’t fully functional now, in future versions of the VideoEgg website, you’ll be able to share the movies in your VideoEgg library with friends and family through our site by checking this. Private videos will be viewable only by you.

As of now, VideoEgg support uploading / addition of your video directly (without human intervention) to sites / blogs based on Blogger and TypePad as well as on eBay by simply entering your login details to these sites. For other blogs / sites, they provide you with a HTML or JavaScript code that can be placed in your pages to display the video. Here’s an example of the HTML code placement…

Since the video is hosted on the VideoEgg server – displaying it on your site won’t eat up your monthly bandwidth limit nor will it exhaust your allotted disk quota.

VideoEgg / VideoEggPublisher supports the following:

• OS-es: Windows 2000, ME, or Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.3.9+
• Browsers: Internet Explorer 5.5+, Firefox 1.5+, Netscape 8.1+, Opera 9.0+, Safari 2.0
• Video Formats: 3gp, 3gp2, avi, dv, mpg, mpg4, mov, mqv, wmv, asf

Another cool feature is the ability to perform some basic editing on the video you upload with the Mark In/Out Tool. The ability to trim the start and end of the video without having to use a video editing package in itself is very cool.

A brief history

VideoEgg is the brainchild of three Yale graduates – David Lerman, Matt Sanchez and Kevin Sladek – who came up with this product during the early days of 2005 while trying to “crack the code on all things video (codecs, drivers and devices…)“.

They further added that…

After a few projects sifting through hundreds of uploaded video files in just about a million obscure formats it became clear that man, this video stuff was hard. With all of the different devices, editors, encoders, and players, there really wasn’t a simple, foolproof way for people to get video on to the web. They all agreed that posting video should be as easy as uploading a photo, so they set out to design and build the VideoEgg Publisher which launched at DEMOFall in 2005.

VideoEgg

Conclusion

The whole VideoEgg experience is very smooth, and the results are very really good. This could prove to be an invaluable tool for any Video-Blogger or even for a normal blogger who wishes to keep visitors engaged by showing video clips.

You can sign up at VideoEgg for free and try it out yourself.

UPDATE:

VideoEgg has long shut its doors, rendering this post irrelevant.