Soundslides Forum

DevWeek #28 - YouTube?

#1

The good news from last week was that our new video encoding engine is feature complete. It’s blazing fast at true 1080HD and gives Soundslides a quality footing for adding new abilities down the road. It’s not deployed to the main application yet but should be by the first week of August, just as soon as the new servers are ready.

Better video leads me to the follow-up question. What are people doing with their exported slide show videos? And can we make that next step easier?

I’ve planned all along to allow direct posting of shows to YouTube. Currently, you can post an exported video to YouTube, but you have to download it to your computer, then upload it to YouTube. All this “uploading -> downloading -> uploading” takes a lot of time and can be slow depending on your connection. We can do better.

I plan to enable connections between your Soundslides account to your YouTube account. Soundslides can then post your video directly to your YouTube account. YouTube provides a mechanism for you to authorize 3rd-party applications like Soundslides to publish to your account.

This integration will be a significant amount of work. How do you feel about this? Would such a Soundslides-to-YouTube integration help you in your workflow? Or open up new publishing options for your work?

Is YouTube your current publishing outlet? Or maybe another video service?

If there’s anything you’d like to share about your experience or needs, post it below.

Thanks.
-joe

#2

Hi Joe,

I work with high school student journalists. My staff used SS extensively back in the day, and we were sad to see it go. It made storytelling so simple that we could focus on the journalism, not the tech! I’m so thrilled you’re working to bring it back.

For my students, direct upload to YouTube would be a feature used each time they published. YouTube integration on their Wordpress site is seamless and intuitive, and it’s nice to try to keep multimedia content in one place.

Anyway, just wanted you to know there’s an eager, excited audience out here cheering you on.

Michelle

#3

Here are your questions:
What are people doing with their exported slide show videos? And can we make that next step easier?

  1. Because I know I can upload images and mp3’s, I often record vids on my phone for no other reason is that they might be grist for the mill of Soundslides. I upload to my mac via airplay, but my sound files I have to save from QuickTime as mp3 only. I know that I could just record sound but why bother if I can have both sound and video and then strip out sound later.

2.Here’s a recent quick take on windchimes and some photos I took recently: “Cosmos 2 Cosmos”

  1. BTW–the embed icon in this rich text editing box generates this when I press it:Preformatted text I would have happily shown you the embedded YT vid :arrow_up:
  2. The YT upload will help with workflow for me. I think it might be the difference between work and play for me. If I have to do the upload myself, might seem more like work. If it is done with one click, then that would be play and might encourage me to spend more time making Soundslides for other venues like tiktok, instagram, et al. I am at the end of a fairly slow DSL (8.0 up/1.0 down) so any automating helps since anything I do is gonna be fairly slow go.

And again, thank you. Love the steady progress in bringing your Titanic from the bed of the ocean.

Terry

#4

Hi, Joe and Co.

First, thanks for bringing Soundslides back to life in non-flash form. I love the online editor, especially since after small edits, you do not need to save to a “publish to web” package and reloading to a hosting website; I can just reload the page on my site with the show (link) embedded and, tada, instantly updated. So much easier.

And as to the subject at hand, a direct ability to upload videos to Youtube will be great.

My only question - and sorry this is off-subject to this specific post - is about the chance of ever being able, in the future, to replace/re-import the audio in an existing show. Unless I obviously missed it, I didn’t see anyway to do that, similar to the actual software version.

Thanks for any reply and again, sorry for posting in an unrelated subject.

#5

Thanks so much, Terry and Michelle for sharing your thoughts and workflows. I’m even more convinced direct-to-YouTube is a good next step in adding publishing options. I’m hopeful I can get that implemented after all of the work is done for the official 3.0 release in late August.

It feels great to be back working on Soundslides again after all these years away from the application. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. I’m looking forward to getting it back up to full speed.

Hi jimmy.

It is possible to replace an audio file, but it’s not very intuitive at the moment. You can upload a new audio file by clicking over to your show’s Library.

image
image.png912×206 105 KB

Then click “Browse” under the “Audio” header, and select your new mp3 file and upload it.
image

If your new audio file is shorter or longer than your current audio file, you will need to re-edit (and possibly re-insert) some of the images on the timeline. You will also have to re-publish the changes if your show has already been published.

Improving that process is on the TODO list for the official release. I’ll post more on the forum about the final “punch list” next week when our office gets back to full speed post-July vacations.

-joe

#6

Thanks so much, Joe, for your prompt answer and for reviving your original brainchild. Kudos!

#7

BTW…feel like a goofball for not noticing the obvious solution myself.

#8

One last thing. I know you may have addressed this previously but I am wondering if you will be reviving the index photos choice to be able to jump around.

My use for Soundslides is to make audio walking tours and my specialty is going on off-beat tangents (hence my nickname) and my goal is to be succinct and make sure that any tangent is generally less than two minutes. But sometimes I need more time so I like to give the tour follower the option to just jump to the next subject if time is of the essence. It would kind of allow me to have my cake and eat it too. Plus it simply is handy for relocating a certain topic within a show to re-listen to if desired.

I know you have a lot on your plate and, as you previously noted, the Soundslides crew is in the midst of vacations, so enjoy and I will look forward to future developments.

#9

That’s not on the immediate TODO list, but I’m going to re-visit the player’s controls after launch. It was a useful user interface for sure. Thanks for letting me know you missed it.

#10

Hi Joe,

I currently post to a beta-site, yapnet.org, which is intended as a free “private” site (you have to be logged in to see most of the content) for artists and creative thinkers to share unfinished work, ideas and projects for feedback and suggestions. This site is in Drupal. Other sites I’ve created and used by kids are also set up to easily post videos or SS via embed code, so, again, the new version of SS will be very handy for them.

I also post to my own site, geoffreygevalt.com, which is in Square Space, and to Medium; Square Space easily handles embed code; medium (dot) com does not. Frankly, I don’t dabble much in the chaotic world of YouTube so my opinion, as an outlier, probably isn’t worth much.

Anyway, hope this helps. Thanks for all that you are doing.

#11

[quote=“terry.elliott, post:3, topic:42”]
What are people doing with their exported slide show videos? And can we make that next step easier?

  1. Because I know I can upload images and mp3’s, I often record vids on my phone for no other reason is that they might be grist for the mill of Soundslides. I upload to my mac via airplay, but my sound files I have to save from QuickTime as mp3 only. I know that I could just record sound but why bother if I can have both sound and video and then strip out sound later.

2.Here’s a recent quick take on windchimes and some photos I took recently: “Cosmos 2 Cosmos”

  1. BTW–the embed icon in this rich text editing box generates this when I press it: Preformatted text I would have happily shown you the embedded YT vid :arrow_up:
  2. The YT upload will help with workflow for me. I think it might be the difference between work and play for me. If I have to do the upload myself, might seem more like work. If it is done with one click, then that would be play and might encourage me to spend more time making Soundslides for other venues like tiktok, instagram, et al. I am at the end of a fairly slow DSL (8.0 up/1.0 down) so any automating helps since anything I do is gonna be fairly slow go.

And again, thank you. Love the steady progress in bringing your Titanic from the bed of the ocean.

Terry
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#12

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