15-Minute Reviews :: VideoPut v1.0.0.13

Hello everybody and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is VideoPut version 1.0.0.13 by Nuclear Coffee Software – An application designed to help you speedily upload videos to YouTube, MySpace, Flurl and Zippy Videos.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“VideoPut is a tool for uploading videos to the internet. Currently, you can upload videos to YouTube, MySpace, Flurl. With VideoPut you can upload videos in more comfortable way instead of uploading via your web browser. Usually even much more faster.

If you have a lot of videos which you want to post to YouTube or other video website but don’t want to spend so much time uploading them in this case VideoPut is just for you. If you have bad internet connection and want to upload big files it would be a real pain to do that via web broswer, with VideoPut it will be much more easily and more faster. With VideoPut you can create lists of videos you want to upload and upload them later. These lists can be saved and loaded later.”

Quick Pros

• Uploads at full outbound-speed
• Batch functionality nice, especially if you are a heavy user of these services
• Drag and drop functionality handy
• Gives you embed code and link to material at the end

Quick Cons

• Interface a little awkward at first
• First time I uploaded, it wouldn’t finish the upload
• Missing features one would expect from a batch application
• Be nice for some other major websites (MetaCafe for example)

Sample

Expansion

Well, this application is surprisingly straightforward. For those who use YouTube, MySpace, Flurl. With VideoPut a lot for your own videos, this can speed you along quite a bit. While the speed compared to the web uploader may or may not be quicker (This application rattles along at my top speed,) the fact that you can set up all the information before you start uploading, and let it go on its way (Say at nighttime, if you have a lot of video.) It’s great that all the common information you need to set for the upload can be set from the ‘Edit’ box on each form.

While I found the interface a little awkward at first (specifically having to double-click on each file to set their settings,) it runs pretty smooth after you get the hang of things. Drag-and-drop support is a nice plus not having to go wading through your directory structure in a small window to find your video, especially if you already have it up.

A major plus to this application is that you don’t even have to leave this application to get the embed code or the direct link to the video; When it is done uploading, it gives you the ability to get the embed code from the ‘Edit’ window or the link from directly beneath the file listing on the main window.

My first attempt at an upload failed for some reason: It finished uploading according to the application (100%) but did not finalize; I had to quit the application after sitting there for 5 minutes without doing anything. It didn’t show up in YouTube so I assume something hung somewhere (Don’t know if it was YouTube or VideoPut.) All other uploads after that went fine however.

While this application does fine at uploading, there are some basic batching features that I feel are missing, as well as a few advanced features. For batching, I would have hoped that you could have set up your accounts outside each upload; This would expecially be useful for managing a client’s and your own YouTube, or multiple accounts that you may have for some reason. With this, it could help with the next feature I feel is missing; Upload to multiple services. While this application is handy for uploading one at a time, with the amount of similar information required by different services, it could be a lot quicker to set up one title, description and keywords on one file and then add the other information as you check off which services you wish to upload to. It would also be handy that when a file (or multiple files) were dragged and dropped, that it would automatically pop up the ‘Edit’ box, one at a time, for the files added. Noone’s likely to want to run with the default title/description/keywords each time (Which ends up being the same as the filename.) and would make it a lot easier for someone new diving into the application easier.

As for the advanced features, it’d be great to see a video resize/reencode feature to help minimize the upload times and allow the user a little more control over their videos’ encoding before it goes to YouTube. Also be handy to have a preview function so that you can see which video you are working on (make sure you don’t have the wrong video or help you with keywords, etc.)

One last note: Why can this not support more services? There are a lot more services out there (MetaCafe is the specific one I feel is missing.) It’d be great if the application could handle these. Even if there wasn’t an API in place for a site, you could always have the application run the website for you (invisibly a possibility too.)

Final Verdict

While you can always resort to these different services’ uploaders, an application like this could help a video blogger, content updater and more. This does save time rather than wading all these different sites constantly. While the application isn’t as full-featured as I would have hoped for, it does do a pretty good job anyways. If you do any uploading to the four sites above, you may as well pick this up while it is free; If the claimed upload speed is quicker, this may make the difference for this application. As for $19.95, if you are an upload-happy person, this may make you happier to use in the long-term for speed and ease-of-use.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, May 28, 2007