Mashable – Facebook Video Just Got Usable

Facebook announced a few minutes ago a number of notable upgrades to their video portion of the social network. Following behind YouTube’s recent upgrades to their display, Facebook announced today that they’ll be supporting high resolution – up to 720p – to go along with higher quality audio codec support. Perhaps even more important, though, is the addition of remote embedding capability.

I remember when I finally got around to joining Facebook, it was partly because I heard pundits and analysts like Robert Scoble and Ken Rutkowski evangelize for the social network and promise near-daily video updates on the service to their followers. Of course, before long, they lost interest with the service and moved on to the next shiny bauble of 2.0.

They, like most of us, tired of the walled garden of Facebook. It was difficult to gain traction on any content uploaded into the system without a way to promote it outside the system (not to mention the difficulty of figuring out if any traction occurred at all with the lack of metrics).

As you can see from my own personal home videos on display, the graphics quality is very close to the original, and in most cases, the video streams without a hiccup. I did notice with higher bandwidth videos that the detection of connection speed left a lot to be desired, and I wound up watching a five minute clip, a half a second at a time.

A couple other minor issues – embedding only appears to be available for clips you yourself have uploaded, so you won’t get to expect that your own videos will go viral on your own. Also, about one of every three times I tested playing a Facebook video, Chrome choked on it and had to shut down the Flash engine.

Other than that, Facebook has finally put together a set of video features that might encourage users to stick around at least a little bit longer. It beats the pants off the quality available at MySpace, but it still leaves a bit to be desired.

Update: Robert Scoble stopped by the comments to leave a link to an interview with one of the Facebook engineers behind the move to HD at Facebook. I just watched the interview and it’s very informative in terms of the mechanics behind the move to the new codec and the abilities afforded by the upgrade to Facebook’s video component.

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