Release Notes: Seven new languages, four new countries get partner program, and lots more...

Bits and bobs that’ve gone live since our last Release Notes...

YouTube is now available in...: Arabic, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese!

Four new countries get YouTube Partner Program: The Partner Program continued its expansion this quarter, with launches in Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand and the Czech Republic. That makes 21 countries in which people can make money from their videos. For more information about partnerships, click here.

Crossfades, wipes and slides: The video editor lets you combine and trim your videos right on YouTube.com, without installing any software. Now you can add transitions, like crossfades and wipes, between video clips. Just select the transitions tab in the media picker, drag the transition and drop it between any two videos in the storyboard.

MySpace Autoshare: Automatically share your YouTube activities on your MySpace account (you can already do this on your Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Reader and Orkut accounts). To hook this up, go to Account > ActivitySharing and click “Connect accounts” next to the MySpace logo.

More filtering for charts: YouTube Charts can now be filtered by categories such as Comedy, Gaming and Pets & Animals, in addition to time and popularity "slices." We also show more results (20) per page.


Improved screen reader accessibility for YouTube player: One of our engineering interns spent part of his summer improving video accessibility for visually impaired people. If you use a screen reader that supports Flash, we hope you'll find it easier to enjoy videos on YouTube now. We've also added some more captioning features to the YouTube Data API. You can list tracks, request auto-timing, and download the speech recognition captions for videos that you own.

Shows in France: If you’re a YouTube viewer in France, now you can watch full-length TV shows, like BFMTV: Bourdin Direct and Britain’s Got Talent. Check out the page here.

HD and CC badges on search results page: When you search for a video on YouTube, the search results now show HD and CC (Closed Caption) badges, in addition to the NEW, CHANNEL and PLAYLIST badges that already exist. If you click on the badge, it will filter out results that don’t fall under that category.


“Add-to playlist” widget: The [+] button on video thumbnails in search results now includes a menu that allows you to add the video to any one of your playlists or start a new playlist. Additionally, the "save to" button below the video is being renamed "add to" and will have the same functionality.


Visited video styling on search results and video pages: Browsers help people remember links they have previously clicked on by giving them a different color, the standard generally being that links are in blue and visited links are in purple. Many sites, including YouTube, opt to make all links blue regardless of visited state to give a more consistent look to the site and better reflect its dynamic nature. However, having a visited state is specifically useful when exhaustively exploring search results or related videos, and so we are launching a new style for thumbnails and links to videos in related and search results: the thumbnail for visited videos is slightly grayed, and the link color has changed. This should help you explore the site deeper without going in circles.

The YouTube Team

Edit video in the cloud with the YouTube Video Editor

Video editing usually requires installing software packages and having a fair amount of technical savvy. But we think video editing should be fun and easy, so we’re introducing a new tool that anyone -- even this guy -- could figure out: it’s an online video editor, now available in TestTube, our ideas incubator.

Without installing any software, it allows you to:

• Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video
• Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos 
• Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs
• Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click -- no upload necessary

Watch this video from powerposter rewboss to get a sense of how it works:



See? Pretty easy. The editor is ideal for merging single, short clips into a longer video. For example, you can transform clips from your vacation into a video travel diary set to music, or create a highlights reel from footage of your last basketball game.

It’s also great for trimming a long video down to the moments you really care about. Say you’ve uploaded a wedding ceremony -- beautiful event, but do you really need to see all the guests shuffle in? The video editor lets you easily remove unwanted footage so you can capture just the moment when they say “I do.”

See what some of our early experimenters have done with (or said about) the tool -- live2tivo even wrote a little ditty for it:

Please play with it and let us know what you think in the comments below and/or check out more info about it in our Help Center. We’re looking forward to adding new features based on your feedback to make the video editor more powerful while still retaining its simplicity.

Rushabh Doshi, Software Engineer, recently created "Gnome Tricks," and Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, recently created “Meet the YouTube Video Editor.”