Uploading your video to the internet:
There are countless sites today where you can upload your videos to get them on the internet. The largest player at the time of this writing is YouTube and if you want your video to be seen by the maximum number of people on the internet, YouTube may be the way to go.
For How2Video, we've opted to host our videos on Vimeo. Vimeo is a smaller community than YouTube with a more artistic and video production focus. That fit well with what we want to accomplish with H2V and so that's how we landed here.
There are a couple of steps to getting your video online. The first is to output your video in a format can be uploaded to one of these sites. iMovie includes short cuts for encoding and uploading videos directly to Vimeo and YouTube. Windows Live Movie Maker has such a shortcut for YouTube, but you would need to create an export shortcut for Vimeo in Movie Maker which would make the upload process fairly simple. (see below)
Windows Live Movie Maker
Here's a video from Vimeo's Video School explaining how to create your export shortcut in Windows Live Movie Maker:
http://vimeo.com/videoschool/lesson/30/video-101-exporting-to-share-on-v...
Then you'll need to upload your file. Directions to do that are here:
iMovie
The process on iMovie is even simpler: http://vimeo.com/videoschool/lesson/39/video-101-exporting-and-sharing-t...
Linking Your Video to the How2Video Site
Linking your video to the How2Video site is simple. Once you've uploaded your video to YouTube or Vimeo, create an account here and log in. Then simply go to the "show and tell" page and choose the "link to a video" button.
The add a video page is just like the page for new forum posts. To add your video, simply give your post a title, check the "embed a video" box, paste the URL of your video into the "Video:" field, title your video, type a brief description, choose the forum where you think it fits best and click save.
Now you're video is shared on H2V to inspire other missionaries! Thanks so much for participating.
HELP! My YouTube video won't post!
"You have specified an invalid media URL or embed code."
YouTube has a different URL structure for your video coming from your YouTube channel that looks more like this:
http://www.youtube.com/user/tdccox?feature=mhum#p/a/u/0/unIEgm982Vo
This is easy to resolve as YouTube has a different URL for your same video outside of your channel. For the video above, it looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unIEgm982Vo
Note the code after the v= is the same as the code after the final slash in the channel URL above. So to post your link simply fill in the VIDEO field with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= and your code.