We rolled out two major changes to the Netscape video player today:

1. You can now syndicate videos in a cleaner, more minimalistic video player:



As you can see, the title bar is hidden, as are most of the icons on the splash screen. To use this player on your site, simply replace the "embed" in the syndication code with "embed-c":

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.netscape.com/embed-c/480/HZLODVUCOSGKKVGKGWYR"></script>

The "c" stands for "cause you're worth it!"

2. Netscape Video now supports all video aspect ratios!

You can now upload videos to Netscape in any aspect ratio (standard 4:3, 16:9 widescreen, anamorphic widescreen, etc.), and the player will resize to fit, keeping the title bar and the controls a constant height:



The iPod-compatible version of the video will be presented using the original dimensions as well. For those of you keeping score at home, that makes Netscape the only major video sharing service to offer this kind of aspect-ratio-indifference. Happy uploading!

If you check out our video page, you'll find an eclectic mix of videos uploaded by our members, videos we produced with our content partners like Autoblog and Cinematical, our own video projects like Netscape At The Movies and various bits of Netscape Video from different events, and you'll even find a few content producers, video podcasters, and vloggers who have started to mirror their content on Netscape.

This is great! Netscape is a content hungry platform, so we want to encourage all the video podcasters and all the vloggers out there to submit your videos to Netscape Video. We're a free service, you can upload up to 150MBs per upload with no time limit, you can upload as many files as you like, and once uploaded your video will be available as an embedded flash video for your blog / website, in an iPod-compatible MPEG4 file, and in the original file format. Plus, each episode will be submitted into Netscape where other Netscape members can vote for and comment on each episode. If you submit your stories with a unique tag, you can even subscribe or tell your regular viewers to subscribe to that tag's rss feed to receive all the episodes uploaded to that tag as an enclosure in the feed. For example, if you tagged all your vlogs / video podcasts with "my amazingly wonderful podcast," you could find all the episodes at this URL:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/my+amazingly+wonderful+podcast/

...and you could subscribe to the RSS feed by adding /rss/ to the end of this URL:

http://www.netscape.com/tag/my+amazingly+wonderful+podcast/rss/

See my previous post about how to subscribe to Netscape At The Movies via iTunes to better understand using a unique tag to host your vlog / video podcast at Netscape.

No matter how big or small, we want your vlogs and podcasts. Start submitting them.

If you're a vlogging / video podcasting celebrity like Rocketboom, Ze Frank, Ask a Ninja, Diggnation, or Four Eyed Monsters, please feel free to mirror your content on Netscape for free or to contact me directly if you have any ideas about how we could work together: ck at new netscape dot com.