YouTube for UKOER resources

Overview: YouTube is the pre-eminent video sharing website. While many of the videos are entertainment (home-shot or otherwise) it is widely used for more serious material and has a YouTube EDU branding for degree-level material. Access to view video is unlimited and any registered user may upload and share videos; the collection of videos provided by a user is known as their channel which also includes user-profile information. Registered users may also create playlists (collections of videos from other users) and comment on videos.

YouTube has basic capabilities for tagging, aggregation, and syndication through feeds, but the focus seems to be on "community" i.e. comments on videos, sharing within or through YouTube (which includes embedding streaming video from YouTube into pages on other sites) rather than resource discovery and dissemination of the original content files. Many of YouTube's capabilities are available through its API.

Formats and Standards
The recommended formats are H.264 codec MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, at 1280x720 (for 16x9 HD quality) or 640x480 (4:3 SD quality). For audio MP3 or AAC codec with a sampling rate or 44.1kHz (stereo). However a wide range of formats are accepted. Letter-boxing of widescreen video should be avoided.

According to the documentation, videos must be less than 10 minutes long and 2GB in size, though there is obviously some way round this for some people since, for example, MIT have hour-long lectures on YouTube.

API
Uses Google Data API, which is a RESTful API based on RSS, ATOM, and JSON, OpenSearch, AtomPub to allow search, upload, playlist creation etc. Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Objective-C and JavaScript client libraries are available.

This API is part of the Google Data Protocol which is shared across many of Google's services, e.g. Apps, Maps, Spreadsheet, Documents, Webmaster Tools.

User authentication/authorization is with Google's own AuthSub or ClientLogin or the more widely implemented OAuth.

There are also Player APIs that allow you to control the YouTube player when embedded in a webpage. Implementations are available in JavaScript and ActionScript Flash).

Feeds
A variety of feeds are available per channel, playlist and video.

The default feed, linked from the resource pages, is RSS 2.0 (with extensions from ATOM, APP and openSearch). Metadata such as keywords (tags) are embedded in the descriptions, which contain character-encoded HTML markup (e.g. &lt;br&gt; ) The RSS 2.0 category field is used for the broad categories predefined by YouTube, not any user-defined tag. This feed contains only a link to the video's page on YouTube.

An RSS 2.0 feed can also be obtained from a search (eg http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/ukoer.rss), but in this case the HTML in the description is not encoded, and the video is embedded as an enclosure.

The API can be used to deliver ATOM feeds (e.g. http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/MIT/uploads), which makes more use of semantic markup and link data principles, with encoded author information for feed and entries, keyword tags, links to other representations and a link to the video as embedded media.

Other metadata
YouTube has been reported to be testing a CC licencing option.

Geolocation information can be provided.

Collections and Grouping
All the videos from a user are collected as that user's channels. A user may also group (their own or other people's) videos together as a play-list, a feature which has been used to bring videos of lectures together into a course.

Within the service, what are the facilities for aggregating resources (e.g. as albums, photostreams, channels) and grouping people?

How might these be relevant to a OER project? For example, could resources from a single course be aggregated?

Content export & embedding
Videos are available from YouTube as streams in .FLV (Adobe Flash video) format. Code snippets are available for embedding this into pages on third-party sites. Videos cannot be downloaded and saved; the original file as uploaded is not disseminated.

Visibility on Search Engines
YouTube features highly on Google Video searches, much less so on MSN/Bing

Usage stats for resources
The page for each video includes masses of information on usage and allows comments from users, these can be obtained through the API.

UKOER

 * ChemistryFM Project in individual strand from University of Lincoln
 * Multimedia Training Videos. Project in individual strand from University of Westminster
 * OLE Dutch History, UCL
 * OTTER, University of Leicester institutional project.

Others

 * MIT OpenCourseWare

Notes and comments
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