I haven’t found a good way to do this yet, among other things my Comcast web page won’t let me upload the video files I want at least in a decent format, unless perhaps I get around to abandoning the cheater site builder they offer and figure out how to set up that site via something like Dreamweaver. In any case, I put one file so far on Kazaa, which, if you have the Kazaa Media Desktop installed, will allow you to share any sort of files you want as large as you want from you own hard drive, as long as it’s up and running.
The file is a short, ad-libbed documentary of the Irish Fair Minnesota from last year as sort of a test of how well it works as a sharing concept. It’s a medium-largish file and an .mpg and should play on most modern video file players like (current) Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc. This might be a good way to make available big, actually decipherable video clips with audio qualities you can stand to listen to for as long as the maker wants the clip to run–IE: people can video sessions or band practice and share it at very good quality instead of the aborted, blurred, jagged, unintelligible clips of a few seconds that are only irritating we often try to exchange due to size and bandwidth limitation via other methods and hosts.
Just search for Irish Fair Minnesota in video on Kazaa for the next day or so and I’ll see if anyone gets hold of it. I’m setting up my studio computer again after some new hardware and nasty virus problems but I’ll get it available in another format or two along with much more ambitious projects when I get them compressed for the net.
Royce, why would you use a service like Kazaa that is notorious for flooding users’ PCs with spyware, viruses and junk mail? Usually you can negotiate large file sharing and storage with your ISP. I’m afraid I certainly won’t be accessing your mpeg any time soon.
Actually, Kazaa isn’t known at all for the spread of spyware or junk mail/spam, this forum and other email-type bulletin boards on the other hand are. Viri are another matter and in this Kazaa is champion supreme. Having said this, if you are not currently running full time virus protection/firewall software you are almost certainly already infected by several of same and it’s only a matter of time before they clog you up or lock you up or whatever they choose to do. As many of these come in via spam and malicious email as they ever do in file sharing.
And I suppose I may be corrected, but I don’t think viruses are carried at all by media files–I’ve never seen one scan out that way in thousands and thousands of downloads and years of doing so.
You are, in summary however, almost comical in your allusion to some belief that if you stay off Kazaa you aren’t going to have any problems. You are going to have problems any time you are open to the net, and if you are, you should be protected, and if you’re protected, you won’t have any trouble at all on Kazaa or anywhere else.
Directly speaking, this sample file is some 300megs in size, and that’s a fifteen minute long, mpeg-1 (vhs quality) video with near CD quality sound. That’s a small file, compressed to medium quality. The last time I was thinking about putting a web site back up the charge for about 400-600 megabytes was 15 bucks or more a month. That would only hold two short features like this at medium quality. To post say, a full DV quality video from a session or band gig or something would be, read carefully, 2 gigabytes for about 17 minutes of tape. Or for a more reasonable example, I’ve got an hour and 18 minute long documentary that would compress down to at best bearable quality to between 7-800 megabytes in Divx or other highly compressed formats. So in short, in video terms, the typical web site storage isn’t anywhere near large enough to be usefull at all.
Direct file sharing is what the internet is all about, what it was ultimately designed to support. How many of you would think it’s a really smart thing to expect this sort of exchange to take place just for fun, only for those who can afford to spend a hundred bucks a month or so just to trade home movies?
Royce, I have, of course, the latest anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-boloney, anti-meatloaf, and anti-aunty software plus a firewall. But Kazaa has had a long history of adding unwanted software. A quick search on Google for “kazaa +spyware” will bring up lots of nasty stories. As you mention, the media file itself is not usually the culprit. It is the Kazaa interface software that loads the additional files. It is executable files stored on Kazaa that are often infected with viruses.
Just a suggestion: why not put up brief clips, nothing more than a half-minute long, to give people a taste, and offer to sell/trade a tape/disc of the full contents? It should not be on any platform that requires me to add invasive software, like Kazaa.
You’re right there entirely. What was I thinking of. The links on my web site etc. for the downloadable “Kazaa” desktop is actually “Kaza lite” which is a totally pirated, stripped, recoded, improved cleaned out program ripped off from Kazaa itself for all those reasons you mention. No spyware at all, but you will get a virus or two passing pay fairly routinely if you download any software files at all.
And the Kazaa bastards have decided to start charging for their software too I think, last time I was at the official web site.
My whole effort/interest is not in trading clips slowly back and forth in a stone-age process regulated by mail and storage media, but opening up the possibility to actually just go out at night, run half an hour or more of video at your local band, club, or session, announce it here, and then the entire world can simultaneously and instantly see what you did literally hours earlier. Internet file sharing puts that capability into the hands of anyone with a DV camera and a firewire card, so I was mostly wondering out loud if anyone else would be interested in trying the experiment, not just by downloading my files, but by publishing their own titles for search so I and others can download theirs–of unlimited length and quality or otherwise.