West Chester University on YouTube

I’m hoping that someday West Chester University gets its own official channel on YouTube. But a search on YouTube finds plenty of videos about our fine university. Some of the videos are pretty good, some aren’t that great, and a few are, well, forgettable.

I found this CollegeClickTV playlist on YouTube, and thought I would share. It’s a playlist of student comments about their experiences at WCU. Some of the videos are a bit dry, but a few of them shed some interesting insights into our campus. Anyway, it’s nice to hear students talk candidly about their experiences at WCU, and to see WCU getting some fairly nice exposure on YouTube.

By the way, you can advance to the next video in the playlist by clicking the arrows on the right side of the video player. There are a total of 8 videos in this playlist, but additional CollegeClickTV videos about West Chester University, as well as higher resolution downloadable videos, can be found on the WCU Channel on CollegeClickTV.com.

Why doesn’t WCU have its own YouTube channel? I’m not sure. For that matter, I’m not sure why we don’t have an iTunes U channel, either. I’d love to see it happen. But for now, I’ll just note that there are some very nicely done University channels on YouTube. Here are a few of my favorites…

YouTube dumps FLV

A report at iLounge reveals that YouTube is planning to switch video formats in order to integrate more seamlessly with Apple TV. YouTube has been using the Flash Video format (FLV), which some believe sacrifices streaming efficiency for security. Starting later this month, YouTube will encoding videos in the H.264 format, which is an advanced, highly stream-efficient format based on the MP4 standard.

One consequence of this switch may be changes to the way people download YouTube videos. Currently, in order to download videos from YouTube (rather than just linking to them) one needs to either manually find the FLV file in their browser’s cache, or use one of many software or web-based utilities to do the trick. One site I’ve used in the past is KissYouTube, but there are many sites out there that provide similar services. Given the AppleTV-YouTube announcement of a few days ago, I suspect that in the future, YouTube video grabbing will be easier on the Mac than on Windows or Linux.

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