Video tagging with Viddler.com

I was on the wine library TV a few days ago and whilst watching “90 Point Wine Values - Episode #248” and I saw these small circles on the video time line. I curiously hovered over them and was surprised when a little bubble of information popped up. Oh “how cute” I thought. So I clicked it and nothing happened, I clicked a few more times and then the video jumped to a new part of the clip. Not sure why the first time I clicked it didn’t work, my connection was slow? Who knows. Wanting to know more about this new idea for tagging video I clicked through to Viddler whose logo appeared in the bottom right corner of the video player.

I had a nosy in the learn more section and clicked “Tag specific moments within a video“. As the demo talked about tagging and showed what else the video player offered, such as comments on particular tags and the option to embed in your web page, I instantly started thinking about all the videos I had taken on my camera and wanted to share! Why didn’t I feel like this when I first looked at YouTube? I think as I browsed more through Viddler, I felt that this was more personal than YouTube. I am not one for posting and sharing all my pics and videos to the world, so I liked how Viddler sold it more on sharing video with who you want, not the whole world. (Also, I think it’s prettier than YouTube.)

So at this point, I fancied giving it a go! So, I signed up & in under a minute I was logged in with an account and was ready to upload a video!

I chose a video and uploaded it via the simple interface and waited while the progress bar whizzed by. Then I clicked the “encode” tab, and it was already encoding the video for me. By the time I wrote this sentence and took a apple shift 4 screen grab (I was writing this exactly as I was processing the video by the way) the video was encoded! I clicked the “completed” tab and it showed my video in a list.

I clicked on “view this” and there was my video! Pretty simple process. I watched it through to check it and then went on to add some tags.

I found it a bit hard work pin pointing the exact places I wanted the tags to go. I tried to add the tag “San Francisco” but as this is 2 words it treated them as 2 tags. It would be handy if there was a way to define if a tag was 2 words like i this case. So I hyphenated it. Not sure if that was the right thing to do, but I didn’t want 2 tags of “San” and “Francisco“.

I tried to move the tag once I watched it back as I felt it wasn’t exactly where I wanted it. First, I tried dragging the tag. No luck. I hovered over and clicked a few more places to see if I could move the tag, but I couldn’t. That’s a shame really! So, I went on to add another tag further into the video. I did this with no real problem, but I did end up deleting tags and popping them in again because I couldn’t move them.

I couldn’t find delete the tag button straight away either. It was hidden in the toolbar at the top where you had other buttons such as, “email this“, “get link” and “embed“. It would be nice to add this to the bottom toolbar where the tags pop up in the timeline. Most of the tag actions are there and it’s the only one that is missing.

Overall experience… pretty good! I muddled my way through the parts that were not obvious with not too much bother, but I would get frustrated with a few things if I was uploading and tagging videos more frequently. Here’s the 3 things I would like to see viddler improve on:

• A way to define a tag that has 2 words, such as San Francisco.
• The ability to move the tag once you have placed it on the time line.
• Add “Delete tag” button to the bottom toolbar where you add a comment, add a tag, share and add a video response.

Voila! My video is uploaded and now tagged in three places! Want to see the video for yourself? Here it is. If you have a web cam I would love to see how the video response works!
Oh, and one other thing… I did embed this video into this post, but it invalidated my code.