CSPAN has come a very long way with their digital video services, evolving from an over-aggressive assertion of copyright to now offering embeddable video.
Here’s a clip of Chairman Brady discussing H. Con. Res. 307, a sense of the Congress resolution on preservation that passed:
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4 responses so far ↓
Snowflake Seven // Dec 1, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Great news.
Since they are in “beta” I hope C-SPAN will revisit the interface design of the video player control bar. There are some great examples of control bar design available around the web. My personal favorites are the Blip.tv and Vimeo.com control bars.
But observing the control bar evolution of Google Video, YoutTube, etc. is a great place to begin.
John Wonderlich // Dec 1, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I agree. I found the interface to be rather confusing, and had a long search to find this video. I was impressed, however, that I was able to find the video for the bill’s introduction with just the bill number in hand.
Hopefully some UI perfecting is on CSPAN’s docket, I expect it would be.
Kagro X // Dec 6, 2008 at 1:02 pm
I’ve found their embedding to be hit or miss, though I can’t find any real reason for it, so I suspect user (me!) error.
I’ve clipped and embedded video from their system three or four times over the past two weeks or so, and only once has it worked correctly. Two other times, it allowed me to create the clip, offered me embedding code, and the clip was successfully embedded for all of about five minutes, after which the video window still showed up embedded in my posts, but with the message “Video not embeddable!” now displayed across it. The latest such example is here.
I don’t know whether that’s because the video was of a hearing rather than of floor activity, or what. But if you use their system to view a hearing, create a clip, and they offer you embedding code, then yeah, I think the clip should be considered embeddable and remain embeddable. That’s going to have to be fixed.
The next day I used their system to watch and clip video from a House hearing, but when I went to get the code from their editor, they offered no embedding code, and I was stuck with just a link.
But I’m particularly annoyed about the clips that they give you embedding code for, and the embedding works for a few minutes, and then goes dead. That’s happened to me twice now. I opened a tech support ticket on it, but not a peep from them so far.
Janet Vermehren-Shepler // Jan 8, 2009 at 10:55 am
Response to “CSPAN embeddable video, H. Con. Res. 307″
Our high school students are doing research and want to use C-Span’s videos in their politics projects but can only play C-Span’s live streamed videos and not the archived ones. Last year we did not have this problem so we need technical support from C-Span to overcome this new problem. So far we’ve tried the C-Span Video Player Beta on Macs and PCs using 3 different browsers and 3 different media players but to no avail. The students are thus doing research on You Tube which works with our system but many of the C-Span videos are not on You Tube and the students are thus missing a wealth of information. I have emailed C-Span and also have a tech ticket open but so far have not heard anything.
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