If you want to broadcast your media across the web and most effective method is to use social video sharing sites such as Youtube, as you may know this particular site allows you to take a video file which may reside in your hard drive and upload it to their servers in order to be published and syndicated.
As easy as video sharing may sound it is not very obvious where many people however, the idea of sharing videos with friends can be very exciting. In order to overcome the technological lingo and difficulties that come with video transcoding we must first evaluate the tools that we have available to do so, a webcam is a very useful tool if you want to have a video conversation or Web conference with big group of people or with a friend, webcams are indeed useful but when it comes to video broadcast they are not the best type of hardware that you want to be using, this is because webcams are only able to capture video on a frame by frame basis.
In order to illustrate this point lets make reference to a traditional video frame rate, a DVD movie normally has 30 frames per second which produces a more natural movement as you watch the sequence, other videos may have a lower frame rate which could be even 24 frames per second, these are still very watchable videos however, if you lower the frame rate to let's say 15 frames per second you will notice that the video movement will not be as fluid as other videos and could get very choppy, this is exactly what you will get by using a webcam.
There are better options when it comes to video capture, the best tool that you could use is obviously a video recorder but if you don't have one of these you could use a digital camera which is capable of capturing video in MPEG-4 format or even a cell phone but then again a cell phone may not capture video with the best possible quality.
Once you have captured your video is time to transcode it for Youtube, if your device has captured the scene in MPEG-4 format, AVI, WMV, MPEG or MOV then you are ready to go because Youtube is able to receive such files and then convert them to FLV which is extension for flash media. In order to achieve good quality after Youtube does the conversion you will need to upload a file which has a resolution of 640x480, if you're not able to upload at this resolution you may also upload files at 320 x 240 but they've may not have the best possible quality which can be achieved at a higher resolution. When uploading files to Youtube, remember to edit their time-frame because the site is only able to post videos which last for up to 10 minutes, anything beyond that may not be published so be aware of the time limit.
