It's Official: Google Video Player Launches But Still Very Beta

As expected, Google Video Uploads went live for viewing today — if you use Windows 2000 and higher and IE 5.0 or Firefox 1.0. Downloading the player was easy but finding video is a hit-or-miss process. I went to Google Video Beta expecting some easy way to start looking for uploaded video — some kind of directory — but it looks like the only way to do this is to toss random terms in the video search engine.
I finally searched for “uploaded” and found a lot of videos uploaded so people could see how uploading to Google worked. So far, the best find is a 2 min. 58 second animated version of William Shatner’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, uploaded May 20. (That will give you something to search for if you want to try it out.)You can start the videos at various points 30 seconds apart; I couldn’t get the Shatner video to play all the way through in Firefox 1.0.4 but it worked in IE 6.2.
This may be the most beta Google beta I’ve ever tried.
SearchEngineWatch: Q&A with Peter Chane, senior product manager, Google Video. Video is being stored in MP4 format, regardless of the original, with audio in MP3. GoogleBlog: Mac version is coming soon. More video links. AP: Google won’t say how many videos are being stored or give a timetable for setting up a pay system.

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