Tuesday, December 02, 2008

How to post your sermon video on the Internet

This post is best suited for those who are interested in techie things. I am one of those people who just wanted to clear the swamp, and I became an expert on alligators.

I did a continuing education course of the independent study variety yesterday. It was called "How to post your sermon on the Internet -- and you thought it was easy, ha ha."

1. Downloaded Sunday's sermon file from the camera to a DVD on the E: drive of the computer using the USB cable. Easy.
2. Tried to post the sermon on YouTube from the DVD .dob file (I think that was the extension).
3. Found out YouTube doesn't accept that file extension, for various arcane (to me but not to you, no doubt) reasons. It has to be converted to another file format, preferably MPEG.
4. Searched my various video programs to see if I had one that would do file conversions. Nope.
5. Did a google search for file conversion programs and found one. It said, "download for free."
6. No idea who the provider of this content was. Hesitated, then downloaded.
7. Converted the video. Started to open the file in Windows Media Player. The conversion program said, "Unless you pay for this free download, it will put a message in the middle of your video, making it unviewable."
8. Ah, $%#&!
9. With fear and trembling, used credit card to charge $39 to buy a year's subscription to conversion software. Payment went through some site called WorldPay CARD, apparently in the UK. At least Visa let me sign up for something called Verified by Visa in the process.
10. Typed in license key. Converted MPEG video ran ok on Windows Media Player, although the audio isn't so great and the picture is a little on the distorted side (tall and skinny).
11. Tried to upload video to YouTube. After two hours, never got any messages as to progress, didn't know what was going on, so canceled the download.
12. Discovered that YouTube won't accept videos more than 10 minutes long anyway, and this one is 15.
13. Did a search for other sites that let you post videos on the Internet. Found Google. After searching the FAQs and user posts, it seems that Google has no limit on video length.
14. Uploaded video to Google. At least it gave me a dialog box that let me know how it was progressing.
15. File was 1034.5 MB. Upload rate was a little better than 1 MB/min. Did the math. 15 hours to upload???
16. Started upload about 5:51 p.m. About 20 minutes later something went kaflooey and it stopped and started again from the beginning. This time it kept going.
17. Went to bed. At 7 a.m. I woke up the computer with fear and trembling. The window said, "Success."
18. As Hiro on "Heroes" would say, "Ya Ta!" I did it!
19. Google is now processing the video. Keep your fingers crossed. I have no idea how long this will take. Or how I can tell people how to access it if it finally does post.

So that was my Continuing Education Monday. I think maybe I qualified for the Nerd Herd at Buy More.

Kathy

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