I’ve been giving the mDialog application a whirl here at Mesh 08. The promise of mDialog is that you will be able to easily share video, via the mDialog site, with your friends on iPod and via QuickTime. So I uploaded the video of Ethan Kaplan and Mathew Ingram to the site to check it out.
There are lots of things to like about mDialog. For instance, there doesn’t seem to be a limit on the size of the files you can upload. Video quality is excellent, as well.
However, it’s something that I can’t really recommend.
- Getting started requires a subscription to QuickTime Pro. Cost $39.95
- The service has limited capabilities in free mode. To be able to really take advantage of it, your going to pay an additional subscription cost.
- The video is rendered locally using QuickTime Pro. That’s a high high nuisance factor, as rendering large videos takes hours, and ties up your PC during that time.
- The video is rendered as an m4v – a proprietary Apple format. That means anyone who wants to play it has to have QuickTime installed also. Flash Video is much more ubiquitous and would have been much more preferable.
- Once uploaded it takes a very long time for the video to be available online. In fact, the video I shot yesterday, and rendered and uploaded starting at midnight last night, is still not online. If it isn’t online by the time I get home tonight, I will re-render it, and upload directly to the blog.
I’m not sure the world needs another video sharing site. Even if it does, I’m quite sure that, for me anyway, the current incarnation of mDialog isn’t it.
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