Putting videos on Facebook

There are a few ways to achieve putting videos onto Facebook. The most useful is the Videos application provided by Facebook itself, since it includes the usual tagging and descriptive features.

In order to get my 3gp format videos to work correctly with the Facebook videos app, I had to first transcode them into a more common format. First I tried FLV (Flash Video) since this is the format that will eventually be used by Facebook. This seemed to produce similar results to the original source video, with noticeable desync by the end of the video (about 3 minutes).

I had better luck generating an mp4 format file, which seems to result in correct behaviour.

Interestingly, the mp4 file resulted in a Facebook video which was approximately 30 seconds longer than the one created by uploading the original 3gp file.

Alternatives to the Facebook Videos app

I also tried using a couple of file sharing sites: DivShare and Box. Both of these sites have their own Facebook apps which allow you to add files to your profile, or share them directly with your friends in wall posts, etc.

These allowed me to use a file I had transcoded myself, thus allowing me to make sure it was converted correctly. Uploading the mp4 file used above didn’t yeild a particularly useful result: Box recognised it as a video format, but couldn’t play it in the browser, and DivShare had similar results.

The FLV file however was picked up by both sharing services and presented to the user in a Flash player.

These services’ only real advantages over the standard video sharing system are the abilities to do your own encoding (potential for higher quality) and to share all sorts of files using the same system.

I would recommend DivShare over Box for casual video sharing - it’s Facebook portlet is more usable (just a simple list of shared files, compared to a complicated folder system), and you also receive 5GB of storage straight off, without the 20MB per friend system imposed by Box.