Everyone loves polls. It's just a fact. YouTube know this so they have introduced Poll Cards to creators.
Cards are interactive elements that slide into view during a YouTube video which prompts a user to interact in one of a number of ways. You can use a Card to:
Promote a video or playlist
Promote a channel
Ask users to take part in a poll
Link to an approved website
Ask users to donate to a non-profit
Beg for money
Unless you're using an overbearing adblock, you'll see them in the video that you're watching.
This, of course, allows users to give you quick feedback where they might not be able to use the comments section, such as when the video is embedded into another site or a third-party application, assuming the application can handle them; or if they just can't be bothered to scroll down a bit. It offers the user an easy way to interact.
The cards can be updated at any time to ask a different set of questions. The video, of course, cannot without uploading a whole new video, bar simple editing like video quality. If you add your own comment asking questions it could be buried under the avalanche of xenophobic bilge that always fills a YouTube comments thread. This way your question will be seen.
You can change your answer too, should you choose the wrong option the first time.
If you're a creator in good standing it is incredibly easy to add a Poll Card.
From your My Videos click on the drop-down menu next to the video you want to add a card to and select Cards.
Once you're in there, pick the position of the video where you want your teaser to appear then click Add card. From there you can select Poll and fill in the details. It is a very simple interface: there's no room for confusion.
Click Save and it's done! You can click on the little i to see your new Poll card. Lush.
Anyone who has been wasting time reading my drivel on this blog will know that I have been somewhat irritated by the lack of response from YouTube regarding spurious copyright claims on videos. I had given up for a while but felt that I simply couldn't let them get away with it!
Anyone else who has found their way here might be familiar with the copyright claims being slapped on their own videos, and how annoying that can be.
Copyright claims can have the following effects:
You are unable to monetise your video, or have to share the monetisation with the claimant.
You are forced to have adverts show on your videos when you don't want them.
You may struggle to upgrade your channel to include certain features, such as live broadcasts.
Your video(s) may be blocked altogether in certain regions.
To my delight and amazement I discovered that a fair bit of work has gone into solving the issue:
Could it be that easy?
Certainly looks like it!
YouTube have, rather quietly, introduced this "Remove a Song" tool to remove the music from your videos without affecting the rest of the audio.
So now we just hit "Save" and let the gremlins cast their magic.
And when the processing is finished...
Success! Well, almost. One video failed.
But let's not forget what has happened here: YouTube have managed to remove the music from the video without affecting the rest of the audio. It's very impressive and not something I would know how to do myself. My planned solution was to simply mute parts of the track, but now that isn't necessary. Yes, one failed, but the service is still in beta. Hopefully this will be one of the features that remains on YouTube. Some other features have quietly come and gone with time.
Of course if you want to do covers of songs then removing the music probably isn't an option. But that's up to you. In that case you may be able to share the advertising revenue, or simply be given permission from the copyright owner.
My videos no longer have copyright claims against them. Hurrah!
I have had to do a lot of research on this damned problem to fight the copyright claims on my videos, which I really shouldn't have to do. They don't even receive that many hits but the lack of response pissed me off. I think I have found an answer on how these wallies came to their conclusion.
This is somewhat crucial to my story: my video, Sunderland Airshow 2012, was of course recorded in 2012, which was seven years after the expiration of the copyright, under the old rules, on The Dam Busters March, which appears in the video. Presumably this was overlooked by the original claimant in my story.
The general idea behind the Directive is that recording artists aren't paid for long enough for their work and they should be paid for even longer. The texts leading up to, and included in, the Directive suggest that this will help poorer performers receive adequate compensation for their work, whereas nobody really cares how hard-up the millionaires think that they are. The E.U. have, at times, been criticised for making some rather ridiculous suggestions and recommendations, some of which end up being law. I'll let you decide if this one is a sensible one or not....
....I digress.
The Directive wouldn't have affected me at all if it was not applied retroactively. From the rather in-depth Impact Assessment:
It appears that a partially retro-active extension, with a specific cut off date, would be the simplest solution as regards the legal and administrative aspects and would bring the most benefit to right holders from the start.
The Impact Assessment explains what it means by the term partially retro-active but it could be inferred that I am affected by this.
I certainly don't know enough about law to give any kind of in-depth analysis of what this all means, but I did wonder if this did not violate Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (codified in U.K. law under the Human Rights Act 1998):
No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed.
I would suggest that the E.C.H.R. only applies to government bodies, though there have been a number of high-profile cases in the U.K. in which the E.C.H.R. has been deemed to apply to businesses (mainly the press). Crucially, though, Article 7 states that it applies to criminal offences, and any legal matters arising from my circumstances would almost definitely fall under civil law. Indeed, there was no criminal act or intent (not on my behalf anyway).
So there we go. Not very technical but it almost concludes the story so I thought I should share.
After writing that I realised that YouTube, in fact, don't even get involved. Their Content ID system finds a match, and a copyright claim is automatically triggered by the system on behalf of whoever claims to own the copyright, even when they don't.
The result being that they then start receiving revenue for your video.
Now, if you're idiotic enough to steal another person's copyrighted material then that's your tough luck, but if the person making the claim in the first place has no claim at all then they're effectively stealing from you, and that is a criminal offence.
Google have recently made a whole bunch of changes across most of their platforms to, apparently, integrate more easily with Google+. One of the platforms affected is YouTube. But YouTube also decided to introduce a new video format at the same time, namely 140p (around 32kbps, presumably for dial-up users).
At the exact same time my ISP, O2, sold their broadband network to Sky, more's the pity. I have been informed that there should have been no changes to my ISP in any way... yet.
If that is the case then YouTube is definitely broken.
Nuisance 1
Connection: Ethernet --> ADSL2+
The first problem which became apparent was that the Wii client couldn't play videos any more, or not for more than a few seconds anyway. When it did play it would randomly stop to buffer only a few seconds at a time, and sometimes give up altogether and exit the video. I am not alone: YouTube on Wii keeps buffering. It won't load more than 30 seconds of video.
Nuisance 2
Connection: Any
The second problem was on the trusty browser. In my case Chromium on Ubuntu 12.04.
I seem to have been volunteered to join the HTML5 trial, which I really didn't mind except that it doesn't bloody work.
The video above is Big Buck Bunny downloaded in H264 format at 1080p. It refuses to play in the HTML5 player. To be fair this has only been uploaded a few hours ago and may need time to prepare/transcode/whatever, but as a general rule the HTML5 player fails on videos a LOT.
Switching back to Flash for affected videos can still give the same message, but continually hitting refresh tends to get the damned thing working.
Nuisance 3
Connection: Any
Another problem is that the video will play for a few seconds, usually the magic number of 19 seconds, and then stop, never to continue. Hitting refresh a number of times is required for this to start working too. See the video in Nuisance 4 for an example of this.
Nuisance 4
Connection: Wi-Fi --> ADSL2+
With my 3Mbps down connection I have been able to play 720p YouTube videos for quite a while. If someone else is on the network then it would happily drop down to 480p and play nicely. Not any more!
For reasons unknown the quality jumps up and down, preferentially towards the new 144p format. This is simply ridiculous! At 144p some videos are nothing more than a jumble of pixels. I have deliberately chosen a picture slideshow to show this as quality should be easy to maintain (very little motion). The video is 1080p.
This video shows a typical example of what happens (approximate times):
0:00
"An error occurred, please try again".
0:27
480p
0:37
Video stops altogether as the download stream fails and there is not enough video buffered.
0:45
144p
0:55
480p
1:13
240p
1:45
360p
2:20
144p
Perhaps the ISP or the connection to the router is the problem? Well, I tested this by downloading Big Buck Bunny. This was over Wi-Fi. Caution: this is a very dull video.
tldw; The video basically shows a number of drops in download speed. If I was sensible I would compare this to a wired connection but I don't feel there is any point: the drop-outs are minimal and very short lived. The download (of Big Buck Bunny) is not affected. I also have no other problems with connection on this computer ever. I feel fairly safe to conclude that the signal is not the problem and given that YouTube is supposed to buffer to avoid these problems, that this is not the cause. Uploading is a very similar story. In this instance it's an upload to YouTube of Big Buck Bunny. An equally dull video.
On mobile, the video usually plays quite well, but recently has decided to simply pause for no reason. Hitting play will start it up again but... Nuisance 6.
Not tested over a mobile network yet but I cannot imagine it makes a difference.
On both mobile and web the video should buffer. It doesn't really matter if it does, however. Once paused, either intentionally or because the mobile just felt like it, the video continues to buffer. When clicking play the entire buffer is lost and the video starts downloading again. What the Hell is the point in the video buffering if it's just going to dump the buffer anyway? A wonderful waste of bandwidth.
Pausing used to be useful if I wanted to buffer a whole video in 1080p and watch it in this higher quality. Now it is simply impossible!
The Android app has a solution: pre-loading. Add the video to "Watch later" and it will download the whole video. Annoyingly if you don't watch every video you have pre-loaded immediately then there is a notification on the phone "reminding" you that you have pre-loading enabled and you're not watching the videos. P.I.T.A.
This has never worked. I have a Philips Blu-ray player which comes with a YouTube app (probably Java).
The problem being that the bloody stupid thing makes no attempt to discover the maximum download speed. This means that it will play at the highest quality, no matter what it is. At 3 Mbps my connection cannot handle 1080p (or in some cases 720p) and so continually stops, buffers a BIT (pausing is no use) and then goes through the process again. There is no solution. Even using the Android app the quality cannot be amended.
I thought this app may be maintained by Philips, but it has the same layout as other T.V. apps for YouTube so I don't know who maintains the code. Either way it's cack.
Same equipment as above. The Wii works fine using the Android app as a remote control. On the Blu-ray player it often does whatever the Hell it likes. It nearly always starts the video twice, sometimes three times, and often randomly switches the video. Sometimes it plays a video I played a while ago because it seems to have created a play list and decides to play that from the beginning. The whole thing is just garbage! The responsiveness is generally poor on the YouTube app on this Blu-ray player anyway. The Blu-ray player itself seems underpowered but it plays all kinds of HD files without any problem.
(The Picasa app cannot handle video at all, but makes no attempt to filter them.)
I'm sure there are more but I think I've said enough for now. YouTube is utterly broken!
I'm sure YouTube users are familiar with the blanket copyright notices that are sent whenever music is added to a video.
My video, a fly-by of the Lancaster Bomber at the Sunderland Air Show 2012, had the music "The Dam Busters March" playing throughout. The link being, of course, that the Lancaster was used by the real dam busters and used famously in the film of the same name. I did not add this music: it was playing while the video was being recorded.
Within hours of uploading the video I received a copyright notice via e-mail, and had to defend my use of the audio track. There are a few concerns with this that I will highlight in a moment.
My argument was that the movie "The Dam Busters" was actually released in 1955, and under U.K. copyright law the theme to this film is now in the public domain.
YouTube listened. Actually, YouTube have nothing to do with it. The faceless corporation making the claim agreed, and removed said claim.
This is nice, and everything, but if I hadn't bothered to do the research then my video would have been silenced.
Why do I need to do the research? The people claiming to own the copyrights should know that they have no claim! Claiming that they do is an offence.
How often does this occur? Are companies creating false claims all the time in order to drive people to their websites to increase revenue?
