Filed under: Internet, Video, Web services, web 2.0

One of the things that’s always bothered us about YouTube is that there’s no way to search for videos without stopping playback of the video you’re currently watching (unless you open a new tab or browser window). MSN Video has had a feature for a while that lets you search for videos and create a video playlist without interrupting any video you happen to be watching at the time, but if you want to browse YouTube’s library in this way you’ll need to look to a third party solution like YouTube Fast Search.

YouTube Fast Search is a nifty web site that lets you play any video you can find on YouTube. While one video is playing, you can search for additional videos and drag and drop them to a playlist window at the bottom of the screen. When your first video is done playing, the next video in your playlist will start. Easy as pie, and something YouTube really should implement on its own site.

[via Google Operating System]

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YouTube has quietly launch a new layout on video pages with a new tab focused layout and video statistics (pic above).

The first change in the consolidation of Share, Favorites, Playlists and Flag into a dedicated tab driven box. The share tab expands out to give a more extensive range of sharing options which includes social bookmarking and voting sites (notably including Mixx), the ability to post a video to a blog, and send to the friend via email.

Commentary (comments and video responses) is now offered in a tab next to “Statistics and Info.” Statistics provided are video honors (YouTube awards) and video referrals. It would appear that users can hide site referral statistics but they are turned on by default, at least for existing videos hosted on YouTube.

There’s nothing to not like about the new layout and features and most will welcome the change.

(thanks to Rahul Kumar for the tip)

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Flickr users can now add video clips alongside their photos, a much requested and much anticipated feature that has been promised for over a year.

The puppet version of Shel Israel graciously kicked things off for us by announcing the new feature in the Flickr Video below.

The product is not a YouTube clone by any means. The Flickr team, led by Director of Product Management Kakul Srivastava, spent considerable time debating the feature set and user experience internally before launch.

The goal is not to have people upload long videos or clips of copyrighted material. To reinforce that, videos can be only 90 seconds in length and 150MB in size (however these limitations may be changed later, Srivastava says).

In a phone prebriefing, I was very critical of the length limitation. But the team then brought me in for a demo and I was sold. The short clips are a perfect compliment to event photos, in my opinion.

Videos are treated the same way as photos and are placed alongside those photos in albums and the main stream. Videos can also be tagged (and geotagged) in the same way as photos.

The video player itself is extremely clean, so videos look like photos on pages that include them. Videos can also be embedded, of course, as we’ve done above.

Another great feature is the ability to play the videos from the thumbnail screens as well as the permanent page for the video.

Flickr video also differentiates itself from YouTube by only allowing pro users upload videos (it costs $25/yr to be a pro user), although both free and pro users can view videos. As with photos, videos can be made public or private. They can also be shared/embedded individually or as part of sets. But like YouTube, Flickr is providing an API for programmers to create services that access videos hosted on Flickr.

Other standard Flickr features are also available for video, such as search by tags and descriptions, uploads directly from camera phones, and various licensing options.

With this launch, video sharing sites that have focused on privately shared videos should be worried. These include Motionbox, Viddyou, and Vimeo, among others.

Update: The Flickr blog blatantly rips off our puppet schtick:

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Features, Blogging, Web services, web 2.0

Triggit is a service for bloggers that lets you add YouTube videos, Flickr images, and text-link advertisements to your page without editing HTML or even launching your blog post editor. The system takes just a few minutes to set up, and once you’ve done so, you can add content to your blog in seconds.

We’ve put together a little video showing how it works. But in a nutshell, you add a bit of JavaScript to your site, and drag a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. When you click on the bookmarklet, a toolbar will pop up that lets you add content to your site including videos, images, and affiliate ads from sites like Amazon and Wine Zap. You can do everything right from your browser toolbar. No need to launch WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, or any other blogging client.

Content you add using Triggit might load more slowly than other material on your site. That’s because your site is basically sending a request to Triggit’s servers asking which content to display.

Triggit supports Firefox and Flock. While there’s no love for Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer users, at least Triggit picked a browser that works on all the major operating systems.

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Pandora.TV, South Korea’s largest user generated video site, is expanding into new markets with additional language support and features.

Pandora.TV launched in 2004 and has grown to become the “YouTube of Korea,” ranking as the countries 24th most popular site according to Alexa (comScore data is not available) with 20 million monthly unique visitors, 2.5 billion monthly page views with 2.5 million hosted videos. Notably the company has taken $16 million over two rounds from Altos Ventures and DCM, said to be the largest foreign investment made in a Korean internet startup.

Pandora.TV offers a mix of YouTube style videos and Live streaming. Like YouTube, videos can be embedded, voted upon and comments left on each page. A key selling point is unlimited video storage.

As of today Pandora.TV is now available in English, Chinese, Japanese as well as its native Korean. New features rolled out with the international expansion include HD quality video playback (H.264 codec support), multiple video upload (up to 5 files simultaneously), unlimited category creation and site widgets. Pandora.TV has also claimed cross-browser support as a new feature, however the Live Streaming service requires a download to view and stream that is only available to Windows users.

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The victim of an alleged rape that made worldwide headlines after footage was posted to YouTube, has been arrested on suspicion of underage sex and perverting the course of justice after it was discovered that the rape was fake.

According to The Register, the 24-year-old mother was arrested on March 28 and released on bail. The alleged rapists, aged 14 and 16, are now unlikely to face charges.

The video led to calls for YouTube to manually check all videos being uploaded to the site, with British MPs targeting YouTube over the incident. Adam Price MP said following the initial outrage that the video “surely shows [YouTube’s] system is completely inadequate.” The fake rape video had 600 views before being pulled by Google.

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A few weeks ago YouTube released a more powerful set of APIs that allow web developers to create services that upload, watch, search, and comment on videos remotely.

Magnify, the video channel service recently focused on social networking, has been hustling to be the first to implement these APIs. What they’ve come up with is a widget called VidyUp (like gitty up, get it?).

Site owners can place the VidyUp widget on their pages to solicit videos from visitors. For example, we could use it here on TechCrunch if we wanted to hold a video contest. Instead of telling everyone to upload their videos directly to YouTube then send us the links via email, we could just embed a VidyUp widget and all videos uploaded through it would be handled in the appropriate manner (emailed to us, added to a particular page, etc).

All in all, it’s actually a decent little widget, although I’m sure just being the first to build something with the APIs was Magnify’s primary goal. The company says it won’t try to monetize the widget, but if site owners get a lot of use out of it, they will be able to turn their visitors’ uploaded videos into a full-fledged Magnify channel.

Update: we had the widget included in the post but removed it because it wasn’t playing nice with Wordpress.

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Video, Web services, Google, web 2.0

Omnisio is a free web-based video editor that lets you snip and paste videos from YouTube, Google Video, and blip.tv, with support for more sites coming soon. The site is similar to online photo-editing sites like FotoFlexer, but applies the same idea to video. You don’t need any desktop software other than a sturdy online browser with Flash support.

The three sites still provide for a very large library to choose from, and you could always add your own videos to a YouTube account should you need some extra content. We can see Omnisio being very useful for all types presentations — professional or student related — in which the subject is heavily documented on those video sites (what subject isn’t heavily documented on YouTube?).

We can also see the online video-editing service spawning a whole new breed of online-content-remixers, which traditionally take funny and interesting videos, pictures, etc. to turn them into into (what’s supposed to be) funnier but fairly stupid creations that usually make fun of the subject and gain mass notoriety. Thank you, Omnisio, for helping us clutter the Internet with even more Star Wars Kid edits.

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If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.

YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too.

This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny.

More coverage of this here.

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Video, Web services, Google, web 2.0

Omnisio is a free web-based video editor that lets you snip and paste videos from YouTube, Google Video, and blip.tv, with support for more sites coming soon. The site is similar to online photo-editing sites like FotoFlexer, but applies the same idea to video. You don’t need any desktop software other than a sturdy online browser with Flash support.

The three sites still provide for a very large library to choose from, and you could always add your own videos to a YouTube account should you need some extra content. We can see Omnisio being very useful for all types presentations — professional or student related — in which the subject is heavily documented on those video sites (what subject isn’t heavily documented on YouTube?).

We can also see the online video-editing service spawning a whole new breed of online-content-remixers, which traditionally take funny and interesting videos, pictures, etc. to turn them into into (what’s supposed to be) funnier but fairly stupid creations that usually make fun of the subject and gain mass notoriety. Thank you, Omnisio, for helping us clutter the Internet with even more Star Wars Kid edits.

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