Popular photo sharing website Flickr now allows its pro members to upload videos in addition to photos. Flickr supports all popular video formats but the duration of each clip should be 90 seconds or less — you can upload longer videos as well (up to 150 MB) but the system will truncate content that lies after the 90-second mark.
With that limit, Flickr could be a perfect place for sharing short family videos that you may have captured with your digital still camera or your mobile phone.
Better still, if you want to send a personalised message, turn on the webcam, record a video and upload it to Flickr.
However...
There’s a small issue here: Flickr offers no recording interface that can connect to your webcam directly. You can record videos in YouTube directly but not in Flickr yet. One way around this is EyeJot (www.eyejot.com). It is a free online service that lets you record videos from any web camera connected to your computer without the need for any additional software.
The recorded video gets automatically stored on EyeJot servers. Once you are done with the recording, download the video from EyeJot to your hard drive and email it to Flickr or upload it through the web-based uploader.
EyeJot videos are in MPEG4 (MP4) format so Flickr will have no problem understanding it. Webcam videos captured with EyeJot can be up to 60 seconds long and the video quality is pretty impressive. In case you are looking for a desktop alternative, try Debut (available at www.nchsoftware.com/capture/index.html) — it’s a free desktop software for recording webcam videos.
{{/usCountry}}EyeJot videos are in MPEG4 (MP4) format so Flickr will have no problem understanding it. Webcam videos captured with EyeJot can be up to 60 seconds long and the video quality is pretty impressive. In case you are looking for a desktop alternative, try Debut (available at www.nchsoftware.com/capture/index.html) — it’s a free desktop software for recording webcam videos.
{{/usCountry}}Amit writes a technology blog at www.labnol.org. You can mail him at amit@labnol.org