Anyone use the FlipShare.com online sharing service? I signed up but can't see an easy way to upload videos to it. Am I missing something obvious?

I assume you're talking about "Flip Channels."  Did you watch this video?  Do you have questions that it doesn't answer?

Thank you. I had not yet watched that video - and it was a good job I did. First I learned how to upload videos to Flipshare.com and secondly I found I was using FlipShare v4.1 on my PC, so there was no My Channels option! Even though I bought my Flip Ultra HD less than a month ago I obviously did not receive the latest version of FlipShare with it.

I hadn't even heard of 4.1. I assumed people had either 3.0 or 4.5. However, it isn't unusual for a manufacturer to ship the latest stable version of software in a given hardware shipment.  Apparently, that was 4.1 when you got yours.

For those who don't know what version you have, take the 'About' option from the 'Help' menu.

I wrote an article about difference between 3.0 and 4.5 which contains a link to the download of the latest version. The article is here:

FlipShare Upgraded to 4.5

Sometime soon, there will be a version 5.0, with a raft of new capabilities, and even some new hardware.  I received a preview of the software from Flip, and found out some of the rest from Cisco's filings with the FCC.  You can read about what I found out here:

FlipShare 5.0, Flip Remote Control, FlipShare TV and Other Surprises

... and here:

The Whole Scoop on FlipShare TV

... and what I'm thinking about it all here:

FlipShareTV: Cisco's Visual Networking Scheme

Now that I have FlipShare 4.5 installed and working and have shared my first items via My Channel (a movie and a snapshot) I have a question. Why does FlipShare 4.5 create a duplicate of the files you have shared? After uploading a duplicate copy of each file appeared in my FlipShare software. Why is this necessary? Surely it only consumes more space on your hard drive. I assume I can delete these extra files or would this cause problems?

I hadn't noticed that, but here's a guess:  You'll note that the videos appearing in your Flip Channel are at a lower resolution.  Flip decided to do that on your machine, rather than on their server (as YouTube does.)  So they compress it on your machine, then upload it.  But that's just a guess.  If you play the second copy on your machine, is it lower resolution than the first?

These are all questions I can/will answer more definitively when I have time to investigate.  It's a question you could put to Flip at theflip.com/support.  I wouldn't delete the second copy until I get an answer.

Thanks for the info, Darrell. I now need help with installing FlipShare on a Mac Powerbook G4 running OSX 10.3.9. Attempts to run the installation software from my Ultra HD have met with no success thus far. Do you know if FlipShare 4,5 is compatible with this version of Mac OS? Also, can I use iMovie v3.0.3 to edit Flip files?

The answer isn't clear to me. I found an answer at Flip support, but it may apply only to pre-HD Flips, which used a version of H.264 encapsulated in an .avi file. Here's one answer from Flip support that may be specific to that format.

When I look at the FlipShare Update page, I see the following prerequisites for the Mac version:

Do you meet the minimum Macintosh requirements?
1.0 GHz PowerPC G4, Intel Core or faster processor, 512MB of RAM, OS X Tiger 10.4 or Leopard 10.5, and USB port

I spent a little Google time, and couldn't find info on the specific version of iMovie '08 you need to edit Flip's .mp4 files.  I would copy and paste your whole set of questions here.

Could you also post the results, so I'll know the next time someone asks?

Thanks.

Alert reader buzzardtx asks a straightforward question:  How do you delete a movie (as opposed to a clip) from FlipShare?

I went immediately to FlipShare and confidently right clicked on a movie, and got a context menu with the 'delete' choice disabled -- grayed out like a dead fish.  So I went off to this place, where FAQ's have been answered by Flip, and not finding an answer, went to this place , which is Flip's place to go to ask unanswered questions.  Here's the text of my question:

I'm surprised that I can't find this question already answered. I notice that 'delete' is disabled from the context menu for movies. Any particular reason?

Does it screw up FlipShare's database if I go to the library location and simply delete the movie (assuming I can figure out which video file corresponds to the one I want to delete)?

Here's the response I got, some hours later:

Hi Darrell,

Thank you for contacting us.

The reason why the delete button is disabled is because the only way to delete a movie is by doing it the way you described below. The Flipshare database will be fine in deleting in this way.

Thank You,

Flip Video Support

So where, you may ask, is the 'library location?'  The answer is found by picking the 'Preferences' choice from FlipShare's 'Edit' menu.  That brings up the Preferences dialog.  Pick the 'Library' tab.  There you will find the library directory, and even change it if you wish.  Just inside that directory is a sub-directory, 'Videos,' containing both your clips and your movies.

Your clips are files ending in .mp4, and your movies will be files ending in .wmv (Windows Media Video).  On the Mac, I believe they will end in .mov. Look at them in the large icon view, or simply double-click them and watch them until you find the one you want to delete.  Apparently, the FlipShare database doesn't get disturbed by this.  (But, I still don't understand why they couldn't just allow you to delete the movie from the context menu.)

Alert reader buzzardtx points out that, having taken the step of eliminating the .wmv file, FlipShare still thinks the movie is there -- it shows the thumbnail of the movie -- except it doesn't play, since the movie was deleted.

So here's my response I just posted to Flip support with regard to the remaining problems:

Yeah, but having tried it, it isn't a satisfactory solution: After going through the trouble of finding out which movie file represents the one you want to delete, and then deleting it, you return to FlipShare to find that the movie still seems to be there, except, of course, it doesn't play.

My guess is that that is the head frame, grabbed when the movie was made, and stored in the 'Previews' folder. But the novice isn't going to figure that out. Nor was I able to easily find the .jpg corresponding to the movie I deleted. Not only is there no correspondence between user's clip/movie names and the .mp4/.wmv files, but there is no apparent relationship between the clip/movie files and their headframe filenames.

Again, I'm doing support of these kinds of problems on my website, so all this goes from our interchange here to the minions. I'm not going to tell them to go to the trouble of finding the corresponding .jpg and deleting it until that solution, too, has been blessed by Flip.

Two feature requests for FlipShare developers:

1. In the list view in FlipShare, is there any reason you can't list the .mp4, .jpg, and .wmv/.mov files that correspond to a particular video?

2. Why not just go ahead and implement 'delete movie' and not make your customers bang their heads against the wall figuring out how to do it? We're talking about users who bought these camcorders because they aren't techno-geeks.

I would put lots of smiley faces here, if they were available... :)

I'll let you know when I get a response.

I thought it might be useful to share a response I recently had from Flip Video support when I enquired about running FlipShare on my aging Powerbook G4. This is the information they gave me:

Please note, the minimum requirements for the MinoHD and UltraHD are crucial to the performance of the camcorder on your computer. The requirements are as follows:

Users Running Microsoft Windows Computers:
• Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor or faster
• Windows XP SP2 with 512 MB of RAM, or Windows Vista with 1 GB of RAM
• USB 2.0 port
• SVGA display monitor and video card, with display set to screen resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels or higher and color quality/depth set to 24-bit or higher (to check/change setting, open Control Panel > Display > Settings)
• Windows Media Player 9.0 or later
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0 or later

Users Running Macintosh Computers:
• 1.66 GHz, Intel Core Duo processor or faster
• Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 or Leopard 10.5
• 1 GB of RAM
• USB 2.0 port
• SVGA display monitor and video card, with display set to resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher and color set to Millions or higher (to check/change setting, open System Preferences > Displays)
• QuickTime 7.5 or later

The processor speed needed for the MinoHD and UltraHD is very important for video playback. If these minimum requirements are not met we cannot guarantee proper functionality.

High Definition video uses lots of data, which you can tell by the size of the files on your disk. Because the data volume is so great, some kind of compression is required to make the files playable on a home computer of any sort. However, even compressed, they are still quite large, and you need a disk that is large enough to hold them, and fast enough to play them. Because they have to be decompressed on the fly, you need a certain amount of processor power and speed to play them.

The good news is that Moore's law will continue to hold for the foreseeable future, so processors, memory, and disks will continue to become faster, higher capacity, and cheaper.

Even editing software follows the trend.  What you can now get for free, in Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, cost literally hundreds of thousands of dollars around 1990.

Still, to take advantage of the advances, I have bought a new computer on an average of every 3 years since 1980, not to mention all the peripherals like printers, scanners, networking hardware, etc.  However, for me, it's been worth it.

I can't resist this:

The Alspa 1 computer I bought in 1981 had a Zilog Z80 8-bit, 2MHz processor, 64kb of RAM, and had 8" floppies that held 476kb each.  This all fit into a box that looked a lot like a shoebox.  I purchased that computer, a Televideo 950 keyboard and text-based CRT serial terminal with 80 characters x 24 lines, (each character 14x10 dot resolution), an Epson MX80 dot matrix printer that printed 80 characters per second, a Hayes 300 baud Micromodem, the CP/M operating system, a Pascal compiler, and Wordstar word processing software.  The total cost was something over $7,000.  I considered, but decided I couldn't afford, a 5 megabyte Corvus hard disk that was about half the size of the computer and cost $5,000.  However, it would probably have saved me enough time to be worth it.

Incidentally, this was all considered an incredible advance, at that time, when I knew only two other people who had purchased a personal 'microcomputer.' One of these, a Commodore Pet, was purchased by a colleague at the University of California, San Diego.  We were trying to design 'mental calisthenics' on it. The other person purchased a RadioShack TRS80 ("Trash80", they called it.)  That person was my Mom, who never graduated from high school, who bought the computer when she was 53, who taught herself how to program, and who wrote a complete accounting system -- accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory, and payroll -- in Basic and DBase II. That accounting system was eventually used by her employer -- an electrical contractor in San Diego -- until she retired in 1992.

Happy Thanksgiving, Mom.

Strange thing has just happened to me. I uploaded some night shots, along with a couple of day shots taken in the same location, from my UltraHD to FlipShare. When I ran the night shots there was either no sound or it dropped out after a few seconds (the clips played with full sound in the camera). The day shots had no such problem - clear uninteruppted sound.

I then copied or shared one of the night shots to my desktop as a wmv file and opened it in two different viewers. Full sound was audible in both.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Why would FlipShare drop sound on one clip but not another? Anything to do with the extreme darkness of the scenes? Just curious.

Clearly, the sound is in the clip.  If the sound plays on the camera, and plays after you upload to and export from FlipShare, the audio has never dissociated from the clip.  So, the only place you don't hear the sound is in the intermediate stage -- after importing from your camera to FlipShare, in FlipShare itself.

Personally, I haven't experienced this kind of problem. I looked in the Q&A for of theflip.com's support section and could find nothing relevant.  The next step for you is to ask them the question directly on their Ask a Question page.

Doing this has three possible benefits.  First, you might get your problem solved.  Second, you might help Flip find a bug in FlipShare, so it won't show up in Version 5.0, which is due any day now.  Third, you can share whatever answers you get here, for the benefit of the rest of us.

Thanks for your support, Rick...