Video Direct out of beta (Blogger in Draft

This month marks Blogger's eight birth and a birthday present for bloggers is the release of "Video Direct" which have come out of beta (Blogger in Draft) and bloggers will see a new "Video Upload" icon in the toolbar of their post editor. If functions the same way as the photo upload icon, the only difference will be you will be searching for video files to upload to your post rather than photo.

I will publish this post, then go back to the actual post editor and do a test video upload using this new "Video Upload" icon (I am preparing this post by clicking "Creat a Link" which gives me only a Rich Text post editor minus a lot of the toolbar icon.

Update 28 August 2007, 6.00pm: (see latest update at bottom of post) OK, I have done enough of testing, and sad to say, is mighty disappointed. I made a short .wmv video with the videocam plus Windows Movie Maker. I signed into Blogger, got into the Dashboard and the post editor window for this post, click , browse to the short test video (.wmv) I made, typed in the title, tick [ ] "I agree to the upload Terms and Conditions, then clicked upload. Nothing seem to happen for a long time, excepting I saw "Contacting www.blogger.com" in the taskbar. Finally, I saw "Done" in the taskbar. I could see a script added to the post which I will put below:

<a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2007/08/3-2-1-action.html#links" target="new">Blogger Buzz: 3, 2, 1, Action!</a><object id="BLOG_video-aff7a311bff96d1c" class="BLOG_video_class" contentid="aff7a311bff96d1c" height="280" width="320"></object>

Update 28 August 2007 6.15pm: Finally, after some 2 hours, I got to see the video in the post. So the video upload icon in the post editor toolbar does work (I call it Video Direct, but looks like you have to give it time to be displayed in the post. However, where is this video stored/uploaded to the web? Is it in Google Video? There is no link in the script to indicate anything. I checked in "Uploaded video" in Google Video and it is not there. I wonder if it is stored in Blogger servers and if this counts towards our total total storage limit. If this is so, I will be very reluctant to use "Video Direct" (That is what I call this new Blogger feature) as video files can be huge.

Blogger Buzz: 3, 2, 1, Action!