March 27, 2009
YouTube adds neat visual during processing
Now you can see thumbnails for every frame while your video is processing, cool but useless
I'm sure by now most people reading this have uploaded at least one video to YouTube, and experienced the process of having to wait for your video to get processed before you can watch it on the site.Well the waiting part hasn't changed besides YouTube getting faster at processsing videos, but what the online video provider has added is a neat new "Flipbook" feature to make that wait not so boring.
YouTube said in its blog, "when you upload a video to YouTube, you'll see a rapid-fire assortment of thumbnails from the video after it begins uploading to the site. Aside from being fun to watch (it's kind of like a flipbook of your video!), this visual representation of the process gives you further peace of mind that the video is indeed processing and will soon be live on the site."
So YouTube is basically giving you a visual represenation of what is going on, on its end. I'm a video producer so I know the joys of waiting for video clips to process, compress, upload, while staring at endless bars with time estimates and inaccurate percentages of when my video will finally be ready to view.
For now, this is simply a feature for pure entertainment. What YouTube should really do is let the user take advantage of all the preview thumbnails it generates while processing your video, and then let that user select from all those thumbnails which one they would like to use for their video. In the end, cool but useless.