Putting a video on your website - Part 2 of 3
Yesterday in Part 1 of this series, the steps for creation and activation of a free YouTube account were discussed. Today, we will go over the process of uploading a video from your computer into your YouTube account for online sharing.
For the purposes of this article, we will assume that you already have your video file on your computer’s hard drive, as we do with our example video here.
YouTube recommends that the video be in MPEG4 (Divx or Xvid) format, at 320×240 resolution with a frame rate of 30 frames per second; however, some other sizes and formats may be used as YouTube automatically converts the uploaded video to an optimized size and format for viewing. Each uploaded video is limited to 10 minutes in length and 100MB in file size.
Note that YouTube prohibits the upload of copyrighted material for which you do not have ownership rights or permission from the owner to use; if you have questions see the YouTube Terms of Use.
If you are a Mac user, we recommend that you use the free Firefox browser to upload videos to your YouTube account, as it seems to be more compatible with YouTube than Apple’s Safari browser does.
To upload your video, log in to your YouTube account at http://www.youtube.com/ with your selected User Name and Password. Next, at the top of the window, click the ‘Upload Videos’ link.
In Step 1 of 2 of the upload process, you are prompted to provide information about the video file you will be uploading:
- Enter a ‘Title’ for your video;
- Enter a ‘Description’ of the video’s content;
- Enter related keywords, separated by spaces, in the ‘Tags’ field;
- Select a ‘Video Category’ from the list by clicking an appropriate button;
- Finally, Select the ‘Language’ from the drop-down menu (the default is English).
For our example we are using a short video clip that we put together entitled “Create a FREE Web Page” so we will complete the Title, Description, and Tag fields with appropriate text which is relevant to our video clip.
When you have finished entering the information about your video, click the ‘Continue Uploading’ button.
In Step 2 of 2 click the ‘Browse’ button, and navigate to the location of the video file on your computer’s hard drive. Select the desired video file and click the ‘Open’ button. Under “Broadcast” select the Public option, which allows anyone to view your video. Then, click the ‘Upload Video’ button.
The video upload process can take several minutes, depending upon the size of the video file and speed of your internet connection. When complete, a message will appear stating “Video Upload Successful!” indicating that the video has been successfully transferred to your YouTube account.
If you wish to upload additional videos, simply repeat the process above for each video file.
Next time in Part 3 of this series, we will explain how to embed your video into your WebSpawner website in a few simple steps.