It’s pretty cool how Facebook has connected me with a lot of old friends from my college days back in southeast Ohio. My guess is that this is not an isolated event and many people are experiencing a reunion of sorts. For me, the phenomenon generated a renewed interest in those idealistic days and even prompted me to digitize some old content in an effort to bring the pictures and sounds online for us to reminisce the memories together.
When embarking on this sort of thing, I always seem to come across a plethora of issues from both an organizational and technological perspective. In this case, I was hoping to bring our college music recitals online. Encoding them as MP3 was easy enough, but getting them online using the same approach I had used for other media files was another story. Here’s why:
Over time, I have become more comfortable using online tools for storing and maintaining various types of media. Most portals offer functionality to limit the access to personal information such as family celebrations, but I have generally felt okay with placing this type of content online anyway. What I struggle with is coming to terms with the best strategy for using and managing the data for the long run.
I’ve been using Picassa to store our family photo albums, YouTube for videos and Facebook, Blogger and Google Sites for content and navigation. We do use WordPress for our corporate blogs, but let’s table that discussion for some other time since we are talking mostly about using tools that don’t require any IT support.
Placing large media files on a hosted solution has 2 major advantages: First, the hosting provider is responsible for the delivery of the bits and bytes and there is typically no cost involved for the extra bandwidth associated to rich media files. Second, these companies must provide the archival and redundancy needed to assure your data won’t be lost over the long haul. So, as long as they are in business, things should be fine. I guess I’m betting that Google is going to be around for many years to come.
So here’s what happened when I tried to place our college music recitals online. First, YouTube doesn’t seem to provide a mechanism to add audio files like MP3s. To get around this, it appears that most people just combine several pictures with the audio file using video editing software and upload it as a video. Unfortunately, YouTube restricts the length of your video to 10 minutes and audio files like interviews, seminars, training courses and in my case musical recitals can be much longer than this.
The sizes of these files are rather small since the majority of the data is related to the audio track and easily falls under YouTube’s data size limit of 1GB. To put this in perspective, if one (1) minute of audio in the MP3 format is equivalent to 1MB of data you could place over 1,000 minutes of audio on YouTube based on the size of the file alone.
Ultimately, I was able to upload the video files of our music recitals to Blogger and Facebook since neither of them have a restriction for a video’s length and my files were well below the 1GB size limitation. Unfortunately, this threw a wrench into my overall strategy of placing audio and video files in the same place online. It sure would be convenient to have a single online media repository where people could store their large media files and link to them using gadgets. To date, I’ve been using Picassa and YouTube in this way, but now I have another location for audio files that are longer than 10 minutes. I guess you could say “size really does matter”.
