After making the decision to move all of my videos over to GooTube Yougle YouTube, I set about the process with diligence.  I completed the migration a few days ago and felt quite proud of myself for the effort.  I likewise felt good about protecting the videos via the service’s rudimentary security.  I had, after all, set them all to private, disabled comments and other YouTube feedback mechanisms, and made every effort to isolate them to xenogere readers instead of the general video service audience.

In fact, while discussing in the comments of that post with Pam how to shrink the size of the videos as well as ensuring they would not be available for mass consumption save by blog readers, I said one should be able to “set the video to private and embed it in a post on [their] site. It’ll be visible that way, but no one except [the video owner] will be able to view it from the YouTube site.”

Boy, was I wrong!

But it was a simple error on my part.  You see, the videos I’d embedded here continued to work for me without incident because I was logged in to the YouTube service.  That meant each video posted on xenogere still authenticated to YouTube with my credentials, so of course they worked!

And if they worked for me?  Well, by golly, that meant they had to be working for everyone else.

No, it didn’t occur to me to test it with another browser, or to log out of YouTube, or to perform any other verification before declaring it a success—and offering advice to others.

Anyway, I finished the conversion of all of the videos posted to date, and then I logged out of YouTube.

What do you know!  The very next time I tested a video in one of my posts, it didn’t work.  It sat at the “Loading…” screen and did nothing except frustrate me.

“Huh…  I wonder what’s wrong with YouTube…” I wryly said to myself as I sat and stared at the video that wouldn’t work.  I then moved on to previous videos and found the same problem.  As is the case with the mentally challenged, I felt confident the video service itself was having a problem and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with me or the settings on my videos.

Yet this continued all day until I realized I should investigate what was happening.  And what do you suppose was one of the first things I came across on YouTube’s help site when it came to videos stuck on the loading screen?  This tidbit:

Finally, you may be trying to view a video that has been marked as “Private” by its owner. Unless you are logged in and a member of that member’s “Friends” or “Family” list, you will not be able to see the video. Check another video to determine if all videos are failing to load, or just one.

My exasperated “Doggone it!” fell on deaf ears for I had no one to blame for the issue save my little ol’ self.

Ultimately, I’ve now had to set all of the videos to public—which I hate since it means I lose control over them, including how they can be found, where they can be embedded, and who’s doing what with them.  The experience has made me question the entire migration.  Not having control over them really irks me to no end.  Given that YouTube now makes them available via their site, and given that they can be embedded on any site by anyone, I’m right back where I started minus the bandwidth issue.  I now have videos over which I have no control.

I could move them all back here and deal with the download theft and bandwidth issues all over again.  Also, I could move them back here and use my own video streaming service already setup on my web server, but that would still create the bandwidth concerns while simultaneously creating a compatibility issue, to wit, using my own streaming service means everyone has to have the player whose format I utilize (that is, unless I decide to stream multiple formats, another headache in the making if ever there was one).

Ugh!

I don’t have an answer to this right now.  I don’t like the lack of control the video services force on me.  Nonetheless, it’s no different than the lack of control I had before when the videos were downloadable from this server (once they were downloaded, I lost control of them).  The one saving grace is that I’m not dealing with the bandwidth requirements anymore.  That seems like small compensation in a way…

Things might change… again.  Things might stay as they are.  I truthfully don’t know at this point because there’s no easy answer that solves all my concerns.

Finally, let me apologize to Pam for inadvertently leading her astray on this.  There are times when I’m so daft that it amazes me I can even remember my own name.  This is just such a time.  Silly me…