Google Video

Last updated

Google Video
Type of site
 Video hosting service, video search engine
Available inMultilingual
Owner Google
URL video.google.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationRecommended
LaunchedJanuary 25, 2005;19 years ago (2005-01-25)
Current statusDiscontinued after August 20, 2012

Google Video was a free video hosting service, originally launched by Google on January 25, 2005. [1]

Contents

Initially focused on searching TV program transcripts, [2] it soon evolved to allow hosting video clips on Google servers and embedding onto other websites, akin to YouTube. [3]

With Google's acquisition of YouTube, new video uploads ceased in 2009, [4] and the service was ultimately shut down on August 20, 2012. [5]

Thereafter, the web address video.google.com has been reused to host Google Videos search engine.[ when? ]

Video content

Google Video was geared towards providing a large archive of freely searchable videos. Besides amateur media, Internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aimed to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies.

A number of educational discourses by Google employees were recorded and made available for viewing via Google Video. The lectures were done mainly at the employees' former universities. The topics covered Google technologies and software engineering but also include other pioneering efforts by major players in the software engineering field.

On January 6, 2009, the Google Video Store launched to sell downloads through Google Video. The service launched with independent films Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks , and Waterborne , as well as content from media partners CBS, the NBA, The Charlie Rose Show , and Sony BMG. [6] Initially, the content of a number of broadcasting companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN) was available as free-streaming content or stills with closed captioning. In addition, the U.S. National Archive used Google Video to make historic films available online, but this project was later discontinued. [7]

Google Video also searched other non-affiliated video sites from web crawls. Sites searched by Google Video in addition to their own videos and YouTube included GoFish, ExposureRoom, Vimeo, Myspace, Biku, and Yahoo! Video.

Video distribution methods

Google Videos offered both free services and commercial videos, the latter controlled with digital rights management.

Uploading videos

Until 2009, users were able to upload videos either through the Google Video website (limited to 100 MB per file); or alternatively through the Google Video Uploader, available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

While the Video Uploader application was available as three separate downloads, the Linux version was written in Java, a cross-platform programming language, and would therefore also work on other operating systems without modifications, providing that the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is installed. This Java executable (.jar) file was a standalone application that did not require installation. Consequently, it could be run from removable media such as USB flash drives, CD-ROMs, or network storage. This allowed users to upload video even if the computer terminal on which they were working would not allow them to install programs, such as a public library computer.

Uploaded videos were saved as .gvi files under the "Google Videos" folder in "My Videos" and reports of the video details were logged and stored in the user account. The report sorted and listed the number of times that each of the user's videos had been viewed and downloaded within a specific time frame. These ranged from the previous day, week, month or the entire time the videos have been there. Totals were calculated and displayed and the information could be downloaded into a spreadsheet format or printed out.

Website

The basic way to watch the videos was through the Google Video website, video.google.com. Each video had a unique web address in the format of http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=<video_id>, and that page contained an embedded Flash Video file which could be viewed in any Flash-enabled browser.

Permalinks to a certain point in a video were also possible, in the format of http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=<video_id>#XXhYYmZZs [8] (that is, with a fragment identifier containing a timestamp).

Flash video

The browser automatically cached the Flash file while it played, and it could be retrieved from the browser cache once it had fully played. There were also several tools and browser extensions to download the file. It could be then viewed in video players that could handle Flash, for example VLC media player, Media Player Classic (with ffdshow installed), MPlayer or an FLV player.

Google Video Player

Google Video Player
Developer(s) Google
Stable release
2.0.0.060608 / 2006-08-22
Operating system Mac OS X, Windows
Type Video player
License Freeware
Website video.google.com   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Google Video Player was another way to view Google videos; it ran on Windows and Mac OS X. The Google Video Player played back files in Google's own Google Video File (.gvi) media format and supported playlists in "Google Video Pointer" (.gvp) format. When users downloaded to their computers, the resulting file used to be a small .gvp (pointer) file rather than a .gvi file. When run, the .gvp file would download a .gvi (movie) file to the user's default directory.

Google Video Player was discontinued on August 17, 2007. The option to download videos in GVI format was also removed, the only format available being MP4 format.

While early versions of Google's in-browser video player code were based on the open source VLC Media Player, the last version of Google Video Player was not based on VLC, according to its readme file. However, it did include the OpenSSL cryptographic toolkit and some libraries from the Qt widget toolkit. [9]

Google Videos and the Google Video Player were ultimately phased out due to Google's acquisition of YouTube.

GVI format and conversion

Google Video Files (.gvi), and latterly its .avi files, are modified Audio Video Interleave (.avi) files that have an extra list containing the FourCC "goog" immediately following the header. Audio Video Interleaved (also Audio Video Interleave), known by its initials AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. The list can be removed with a hex editor to avoid playback issues with various video players. [10] [11] The video is encoded in MPEG-4 ASP alongside an MP3 audio stream. MPEG-4 video players can render .gvi Google Video Files without format conversion (after changing the extension from .gvi to .avi, although this method of just renaming the file extension does not work with videos purchased with DRM to inhibit unauthorized copying). Among other software VirtualDub is able to read .gvi files and allows the user to convert them into different formats of choice. There are also privately developed software solutions, such as GVideo Fix, that can convert them to .avi format without recompression. MEncoder with "-oac copy -ovc copy" as parameters also suffices.

AVI and MP4

Besides GVI and Flash Video, Google provided its content through downloadable Audio Video Interleave (.avi) and MPEG-4 (.mp4) video files. Not all formats are available through the website's interface, however, depending on the user's operating system.

Where available, Google's "save as" function for Windows/Mac produced an .avi file, while the "save as" function for iPod and PSP produced an .mp4 file.

This .avi file was not in standard AVI format. To play the file in a popular media player such as Winamp or Windows Media Player, the file had to first be modified, using a hex editor to delete the first LIST block in the file header, which started at byte 12 (000C hex, first byte in file is byte 0) and ended at byte 63 (003F hex). [10] [11] Optionally, the file length (in bytes 4 to 7, little endian) should also be amended, by subtracting 52 (3F hex – 0C hex = 33 hex).

Winamp and Windows Media Player cannot play the unmodified .avi file because the non-standard file header corrupts the file. However, Media Player Classic, MPlayer, the VLC Media Player and GOM Player will play the unmodified .avi file, and the Google .mp4 file. Media Player Classic can do so only if an MPEG-4 DirectShow Filter, such as ffdshow, is installed. Most Linux media players (including xine, Totem, the Linux version of VLC Media Player, and Kaffeine) have no problem playing Google's .avi format.

An mp4 video file will play in Winamp 5 if an MPEG-4/H.264 DirectShow Filter such as ffdshow and an MP4 Splitter such as Haali are installed, and the extension; MP4 is added to the Extension List in the Winamp DirectShow decoder configuration.

In the spring of 2008, the option to download files in .AVI format was removed. Files were henceforth only available as Flash video or .MP4 video. The same videos, when accessed through the companion YouTube.com site, were available only in Flash video format.

Third-party download services

Google offered users the means to save only some of the videos on the site, mostly for copyright reasons. Their documentation went so far as to claim that only these videos could be downloaded. However, since viewing a video requires downloading it to the computer, their software merely made saving videos less than trivially difficult, not impossible: a number of solutions, including external software and bookmarklets, have been developed.

Market adoption

Despite downloading being available in multiple formats, being less restrictive on video uploads, and Google being tremendously well-known, Google Videos had only a minor share from the online video market, amassing around 2.5 million videos uploaded.[ citation needed ]

While initially only available in the United States, over time Google Videos had become available to users in more countries and could be accessed from many other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan.

Regardless of general availability, content providers were given the opportunity to limit access to video files to only users from certain countries of residence. However, methods of circumventing geographical filtering existed.

Shutdown

On October 9, 2006, Google bought former competitor YouTube. Google announced on June 13, 2007, that the Google Video search results would begin to include videos discovered by their web crawlers on other hosting services, in YouTube and user uploads. [12] Thereafter, search result links opened a frameset with a Google Video header at the top, and the original player page below it.

As of August 2007, the DTO/DTR (download-to-own/rent) program ended. Users who previously purchased a video from Google Video were no longer able to view them. Credits for users were made available as values for Google Checkout and were valid for 60 days. [13] [14]

In 2009, Google ended the ability for users to upload videos to Google Video. Videos that were already uploaded continued to be hosted. [15] Later, other navigation features were retired, such as ability to cross-reference videos back to now-inactive user accounts, as well as selection of top videos.[ citation needed ]

On April 15, 2011, Google announced that they would stop hosting user-uploaded videos. The plan would make videos unavailable for public viewing on April 29 and removed from users' accounts in 28 days. [16] On April 22, 2011, a week after the announcement, Google announced that due to feedback they would not be removing videos at this time. They will start automatically migrating videos to YouTube instead, as well as providing easier tools for account holders to do so themselves. [17] [16]

On August 20, 2012, the video hosting service was ultimately shut down and the remaining Google Video content was automatically migrated to YouTube. By default, the videos were set to private but the original content owners could later publish them as public videos if they desired. [18]

As of 2021, the video search engine continues to operate as Google Videos. The domain previously associated with Google Video is now internally used to store videos uploaded to Google Photos and YouTube.

See also

Related Research Articles

The Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) is an application-level network protocol designed for multiplexing and packetizing multimedia transport streams over a suitable transport protocol. RTSP is used in entertainment and communications systems to control streaming media servers. The protocol is used for establishing and controlling media sessions between endpoints. Clients of media servers issue commands such as play, record and pause, to facilitate real-time control of the media streaming from the server to a client or from a client to the server.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Playlist</span> Curated list of video or audio files

A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player, either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in a loop. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of television broadcasting, radio broadcasting and personal computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VLC media player</span> Free and open-source media-player and streaming-media-server

VLC media player is a free and open-source, portable, cross-platform media player software and streaming media server developed by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS. VLC is also available on digital distribution platforms such as Apple's App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RealPlayer</span> Media player app

RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3, MP4, QuickTime File Format, Windows Media format, and the proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. RealPlayer is also available for other operating systems; Linux, Unix, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian versions have been released.

The following comparison of video players compares general and technical information for notable software media player programs.

3GP is a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 3G UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phones but can also be played on some 2G and 4G phones.

ffdshow Open-source unmaintained codec library

ffdshow is an open-source unmaintained codec library that is mainly used for decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video formats, but it supports numerous other video and audio formats as well. It is free software released under GNU General Public License 2.0, runs on Windows, and is implemented as a Video for Windows (VFW) codec and a DirectShow filter.

A container format or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Notable examples of container formats include archive files and formats used for multimedia playback. Among the earliest cross-platform container formats were Distinguished Encoding Rules and the 1985 Interchange File Format.

These tables compare features of multimedia container formats, most often used for storing or streaming digital video or digital audio content. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at comparison of media players.

Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in the same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format, starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video. Users include Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miro (video software)</span> Internet television software

Miro was an audio, video player and Internet television application developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation. It runs on Microsoft Windows, macOS, FreeBSD and Linux and supports most known video file formats. It offers both audio and video, some in HD quality.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of current, notable video hosting services. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KMPlayer</span> Freeware media player for Microsoft Windows

K-Multimedia Player is an Adware-supported media player for Windows and iOS that can play most current audio and video formats, including VCD, HDML, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, AAC, WMA 7, 8, WMV, RealMedia, FLV and QuickTime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tudou</span> Chinese video-sharing website headquartered in Shanghai

Tudou, Inc. is a Chinese video-sharing website headquartered in Shanghai, China, where users can upload, view and share video clips. Tudou went live on April 15, 2005 and by September 2007 served over 55 million videos each day.

A demultiplexer for digital media files, or media demultiplexer, also called a file splitter by laymen or consumer software providers, is software that demultiplexes individual elementary streams of a media file, e.g., audio, video, or subtitles and sends them to their respective decoders for actual decoding. Media demultiplexers are not decoders themselves, but are format container handlers that separate media streams from a (container) file and supply them to their respective audio, video, or subtitles decoders.

The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of audio and video codecs for Microsoft Windows DirectShow that enables an operating system and its software to play various audio and video formats generally not supported by the operating system itself. The K-Lite Codec Pack also includes several related tools, including Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC), Media Info Lite, and Codec Tweak Tool.

A progressive download is the transfer of digital media files from a server to a client, typically using the HTTP protocol when initiated from a computer. The consumer may begin playback of the media before the download is complete. The key difference between streaming media and progressive download is in how the digital media data is received and stored by the end user device that is accessing the digital media.

HTTP Live Streaming is an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol developed by Apple Inc. and released in 2009. Support for the protocol is widespread in media players, web browsers, mobile devices, and streaming media servers. As of 2022, an annual video industry survey has consistently found it to be the most popular streaming format.

The HTML5 specification introduced the video element for the purpose of playing videos, partially replacing the object element. HTML5 video is intended by its creators to become the new standard way to show video on the web, instead of the previous de facto standard of using the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin, though early adoption was hampered by lack of agreement as to which video coding formats and audio coding formats should be supported in web browsers. As of 2020, HTML5 video is the only widely supported video playback technology in modern browsers, with the Flash plugin being phased out.

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over HTTP. An early HTTP web server based streaming system called SProxy was developed and deployed in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 2006. It showed how to use HTTP range requests to break the content into small segments. SProxy shows the effectiveness of segment based streaming, gaining best Internet penetration due to the wide deployment of firewalls, and reducing the unnecessary traffic transmission if a user chooses to terminate the streaming session earlier before reaching the end. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sport event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of playback time. While the content is being played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client uses a bit rate adaptation (ABR) algorithm to automatically select the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing stalls or re-buffering events in the playback. The current MPEG-DASH reference client dash.js offers both buffer-based (BOLA) and hybrid (DYNAMIC) bit rate adaptation algorithms. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions and provide high quality playback with few stalls or re-buffering events.

References

  1. ↑ "Google Video Search Live". blogoscoped.com. Retrieved August 6, 2017.
  2. ↑ "We're tuning in to TV". googleblog.blogspot.com. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  3. ↑ "Google wants your video". googleblog.blogspot.com. Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  4. ↑ "Turning Down Uploads at Google Video" . Retrieved August 6, 2017.
  5. ↑ Perez, Sarah (July 3, 2012). "Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini & Others Are Killed | TechCrunch" . Retrieved August 6, 2017.
  6. ↑ Raman, Sanjay (August 8, 2005). "A New Year for Google Video" . Retrieved April 22, 2011.
  7. ↑ National Archives and Google Launch Pilot Project Archived May 21, 2011, at the Wayback Machine (NARA press release, published on February 24, 2006)
  8. ↑ New Feature: Link within a Video, Official Google Video Blog, July 19, 2006
  9. ↑ Copyrights for Google Video Player, noting the inclusion of several open source libraries
  10. 1 2 Removing the "goog" list from a Google Video file (tutorial video)
  11. 1 2 Comprehensive FAQ related to video downloads
  12. ↑ Alex Chitu (June 13, 2007). "Google Frames a Video Search Engine".
  13. ↑ Cory Doctorow (August 10, 2007). "Google Video robs customers of the videos they "own"". boingboing.net.
  14. ↑ John C. Dvorak, "Google Pulls Plug, Everyone Misses Point". PC Magazine (online) . August 14, 2007.
  15. ↑ Turning Down Uploads at Google Video, by Michael Cohen, Product Manager, January 14, 2009, Official Google Video Blog, accessed April 23, 2009
  16. 1 2 TechCrunch (April 15, 2011). "Google Video Prepares To Enter The Deadpool For Good". TechCrunch .
  17. ↑ An update on Google Video – Finding an easier way to migrate Google Video content to YouTube
  18. ↑ "Google Video content moving to YouTube". Official YouTube Blog. July 3, 2012. Retrieved June 24, 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.