Google Video Files Playback

So this morning around 1 am, I decided to have a look at Google Video. Downlaoded the software on the Mac, searched for some interesting videos (Google TechTalks is one of my favorite categories) and downloaded a few of them.

What I like about it is that it's very simple and fast. I do regret the fact that it cannot work over a SOCKS proxy though. For what I have mostly seen on most software I've recently downloaded, people always seem to forget to add an option for SOCKS proy servers. This results in incomplete software as some options have been left out!

So anyways, the Google Video application downloads the choosen videos and play them while the download is done in the background. The videos are stored on the user's computer for later viewing.

Two things though:

1 - Playlists aren't greatly supported (there's some kind of option for that but nothing great compared to other video playback software I am used to).

2 - Some video options such as "Play faster or slower, image capture, sound equalizer" are missing.

3 - The videos are stored with a "gvi" extension. Making it hard to play somewhere else (in theory that is).

So to sum it up: we can get great videos for free but for most of them, all we can do is watch and little work can be done on them.

I did some googling and fount out that in fact many people or software companies have written software that would enable users to convert GVIs into AVIs and so on. Some of them are free but most of them are sharewares that users would end up paying for.

Like I said earlier, the fact that the files can only be played by the Google Video application is only a theory. When it comes to videos, what matters the most are the CODECs. If you've got the appropriate codec, you can play a video that has been encoded in its format.

I also thought that in the current age of software component reuse, it would be a waste to rewrite existing components just for little piece of software, unless of course Google was coming up with a better codec than the existing ones. What I am trying to get at is that if we tried to play GVIs in a generic player that would function with all the codecs installed on a particular system, things should work as expected.

One of the best video playback applications on Mac and Windows systems at the moment is VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc. I created a playlist there with all the GVI files I downloaded and it played! Besides just playing, I could run all the functions I would use on normal videos with the application.

My 1st point is: people buying conversion software to do the same from companies producing those are being totally ripped-off.

My 2nd point is: computer users in general should try and know their systems better than they currently do and believe it or not: this is one of the biggest problems of the computer age. People buy systems that can do amazing things but only use the tip of the iceberg and that's absolutely sad.