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since 11/13/03 

©2003-5 Cat Jams Label / Blanche Braden / Aaron Arnoldy / authors & artists / Channing Kennedy

I sent this to someone on MySpace and figured other people might benefit from it too. As far as I know, this is how to most effectively maximize your YouTube archiving experience.

Hey Jerserf,

As someone who's embarked on a few massive YouTube projects in his day, I thought I could offer you some pointers I've learned th ahrd way about maximizing the quality and upload speed of your YouTubeage.

1. Get registered as a 'director' account. You basically just have to email them and say "I'm a real person, not a spambot" and they'll OK you. (there's a form somewhere on the site, a quick search will bring it up.) As a director, you can upload videos of any length (so you don't have to cut a 20 minute show into three 7-minute segments and upload each one separately). However, there's still a size limitation: you can still only upload video files smaller than 100 megs. Larger ones will stay uploading all night then result in an uniformative error message.

2. But that's not really a problem with a great program like Handbrake (you can find it at Versiontracker.com or wherever). Handbrake is all but designed for YouTube: it rips video DVDs into mp4 files in one easy step.

What format is your video in now? If it's not in DVD, this whole speil might not be much help, but it's really easy and looks great. If the format you're working on now is VHS, my professional advice is to buy an integrated DVDR/VHS recorder at Best Buy for a few hundred dollars on a credit card, dupe all or as much as possible of your media onto DVDR, then return the recorder to the store and get your money back. Repeat until finished. Nobody at Best Buy gets paid enough to care, and these DVDRs generally look quite good (or at least good enough for YouTube).

(By the way, Handbrake is Mac only, I believe.)

Anyhoo. Now that your media's all on DVD, open up Handbrake. Handbrake only lets you choose sections to convert by chapter marker, not timecode (an unfortunate oversight), so get that straightened out beforehand (just put discrete programs on their own discs, or put a chapter marker between them while you're duping on the recorder). Set the Maximum File Size to 99 megs -- Handbrake will automatically scale down the quality to match it. Set your encoding codec to H264 (It looks a lot better than standard mp4). And click the Image Options button at the button to change the aspect ratio to 320 x 240 -- you can even remove the black margins and gain a few pixels of image.

Handbrake has a queue, so you can repeat the process and get a few videos lined up before you go to bed. Just make sure you give them different file names! If you're ripping from two DVDs at once (one in an external drive, one on the internal drive, and a few as disc images copied onto the hard drive and mounted, say), Handbrake has a weird bug that requires you to be quick on the draw when selecting other discs, but it can be done.

And of course, after the ripping's all done, you can upload multiple videos simultaneously to Youtube with the magic of multiple browser windows. It'll take all night again... but as long as your files are less than 100 megs, they WILL got up eventually (barring connection errors, goblins, etc.).

Well, I hope this unrequested advice helps out in some way. I've slogged through enough codec bullshit in my day that I wouldn't wish it on anyone else. I've got plenty of 40+minute videos I've ripped with this method on my Youtube page, so you can check those out and see the quality and loading speed.

You're archiving some really wonderful stuff here, and I can't wait to see more of it!

Channing



----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: Jerserf Wheet
Date: Nov 5 2006 9:54 PM

For the last several weeks, I have been helping Kelly Kuvo digitize and upload her massive library of underground art videos to YouTube. As you may remember from previous blog entries, Kelly serenaded Alton and I inside a recording studio in the Capitol Records Building earlier this year with a song called "Go Away, Thank You." But, she’s most famously known for her involvement in two of the most righteous punk bands EVER - The Scissor Girls and Sweet Thunder - and her jaw-droppingly surreal interventions on Chicago’s public access TV station in the 90's. I don’t know how to begin to describe her video work other than to say click here. A world of absolute artistic hope, shambling beauty and d.i.y. situationist ethos awaits!

Kelly explains: "What you are about to see are zero dollar budget Cable TV shows intended to force a couch potato fat ass average Chicagoland non-artist type of person to flip the channel after watching them for 5 minutes. I imagined that they’d surf through 100 other channels of million dollar budget productions and then wind up watching another 10 minutes of my production and ultimately wonder what the fuck is up with this show that doesn’t make any sense or lead anywhere!"

The fact that you’ll be watching as a captive internet audience sort of undermines the righteousness of the original site-specificity of these pieces. But whatever! Enjoy out of context... and watch this blog in the coming months for a special surprise, related in a way that I can’t divulge yet, alignments of stars pending.

http://peripherus-max.livejournal.com/

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