Show Your Videos on Your Places

Now you can mark the spot where your little girl first learned to ride her two-wheeler and post a video of her doing it in the description of the Place.

Now you can make a map of your favorite dog parks and include videos of the frolicking canines there.

Now you can embed video files into Platial Place descriptions.

You can see an example of the one we put on our office location. (Scroll down a little.)

I did a little research and experimentation this afternoon, to figure out how to get a video clip from my camera onto a Platial description. It is incredibly easy. I first uploaded the clip from my hard drive to a video sharing site, then I copied the html that these sites give you into the description field.

There are a lot of video sharing sites out there and some of you already have your favorites. Of the seven that I tried, two worked for me:

DropShots

1. Download the clip from your phone/camera to your hard drive.
2. Go to DropShots and register. Click on create a free account now and fill in the form.
3. You don't even have to confirm your registration to get started. They let you upload your first movie right away. Just click on the word upload at the top right side of the page.
4. Choose your video files from your hard drive by clicking on the browse button, just like you would for photos. When you've finished selecting your files, click on upload files at the bottom of the upload box. It might take a minute, depending on how big your movie is. A little pop up window lets you know how the upload is progressing.
5. It's not very easy to find, but at the bottom right of the page, written fairly small, is your dropshots url: www.dropshots/username. Click on that to get to your home page. If you want to use this site a lot, you might bookmark your home page.
6. Click on the thumbnail of the video you want to put on your Platial Place.
7. To the right of the video there is a list of tools. Click on Blog/Link. It's the last one on the list. This is going to take you to a page showing several boxes with html in them.
8. Select the html from the first box, which is titled HTML code, and simply paste it into the description field of your Place on Platial.

Voila.

YouTube

1. Download the clip from your phone/camera to your hard drive.
2. Go to Youtube and click on Sign up at the top right of the page. Fill in the form and wait to get your email confirmation. This took a few minutes for me. It might go into your bulk folder by mistake.
2. Log in.
3. Click on the Upload tab at the far right of the page, toward the top.
4. Youtube requires you to give a lot of information about your video. Title, description, tags, etc. All of these fields are required. Once you've filled them in, click Continue ->.
5. Choose your file from your hard drive by clicking on the Browse button.
6. Click on Upload Video. It might take a minute, depending on how big your movie is. The word "uploading" appears under the button to let you know that the video is still coming in. Don't click around in the Youtube sight or you'll lose the upload. This is a great time to check email.
7. After you upload, you are offered a page where you can add more information about your clip. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. You will see a box with some HTML code in it labeled Embed HTML. Just select that, and copy it into the description field of your Platial Place.

Piece of cake.

I'm going to keep experimenting with other sites. I'll keep you posted, and we'll be putting all this information into our faq soon.

Comments

[jason]

SO, how actually do you do it?

[Ian]

I managed to post a Revver clip (http://www.platial.com/spinneyhead/places?detail=62174&zoom&title=Ride%20Manchester) by pasting their code into the description section.

[paigedestroy]

Nice posting Tracy. I am going to follow you tutorial to the word!

[Tracy Rolling]

Jason brought to my attention that dropshots doesn't give you free unlimited video upload, so it looks like YouTube is the way to go. If you change the viewer size attributes to 340 by 280 it will fit up snug next to the pictures and not hang down all the way at the bottom.