Tubes is awesome. It just is.
While I wasn’t planning on writing anything today (it is Sunday, football day), but I just had a great experience with Tubes, so I felt compelled to share it.
I recently started doing a webcast (okay, not technically a webcast since it is not live, but you get the idea) with a couple of friends. I’ve been using my FlipVideo camera to record the show, and I love it. The camera was only $150 and it records 60 minutes of video.
So, this morning while dumping some footage onto my Vista laptop, a prompt came up asking me if I’d like to update my FlipVideo software. Well, I did, and that was a bad idea. Now, the camera is completely useless on my Vista laptop. Just connecting the camera via USB causes everything to crash. Everything.
Luckily I brought my XP laptop home with me for the weekend. I connected the camera, and was able to save the videos to the desktop. That was a relief; I didn’t lose any footage, but now I had a problem. I have 200+ megs of video files on one laptop, but all my video editing software is on the other one. I don’t have any external storage devices here (USB sticks, external drives, etc), so I had to think fast.
If I were a cartoon, you’d see a thought bubble with a light bulb in it above my head.
In minutes I was able to sign up for a free Tubes account, had the software downloaded, and uploaded the files. I moved over to the Vista machine, downloaded the same software, and just like that I was in business.
When you download the client, it will remind you of an Instant Messaging client. It shows your tubes (you can create different tubes, allowing you to easily organize different content), and you are able to set different permissions on those tubes. For example, if I want anyone to be able to find my tube to see my videos, I can set public permissions on that tube, while keeping other tubes private.
What’s better is that each file has its own URL. So if I want to send someone my videos, but don’t want to email a 200 meg file, I can just give them the URL to my video in the tube.
Another biggie: synchronization. When you change the file on your machine, it synchs with the copy in your tube site. Awesome.
Thanks tubes. You’ve prevented me from throwing my FlipVideo out of a window.
I’m going to continue using Tubes, and after I get used to the software, I’ll revisit this post, and will give a more detailed review of what it can do. But for now, I’m very, very happy.
Their DEMO:
Filed under: DEMO
[...] is gone. I heard about them at DEMO last September and wrote about them when I had a need for what they were offering. But alas, the service is [...]