Starship Asterisk*

Hey guys,

When this video is played

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081125.html

thumbnail links appear at the bottom of the vid (however they are youtube thumbnails - NOT - Nasa - but - the way the vid was wrapped into the site it can be mistaken - if one checks these out they play within your NASA wrap (not a good idea) since several are complete hoax's yet appear to the average viewer to be NASA material - this one is alarming and most confusing to find on your site . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0BifYPQ ... 81125.html

however when I googled it for authenticity I got this after a few attempts . . .

http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/case_tape347/

so what's the point? maybe you should not wrap you tube content this way as it is so ridiculously unreliable - I only took it half way serious at first as it appeared to be a NASA sponored video yet I really wanted to find out why you would post something like that here - as that would be a really alarming video if real due to your credibility.

But the jokes on me.

techmax wrote:Hey guys,

When this video is played

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081125.html

thumbnail links appear at the bottom of the vid (however they are youtube thumbnails - NOT - Nasa - but - the way the vid was wrapped into the site it can be mistaken - if one checks these out they play within your NASA wrap (not a good idea) since several are complete hoax's yet appear to the average viewer to be NASA material - this one is alarming and most confusing to find on your site . . .

It would certainly be best not to wrap YouTube videos, because of this and other problems (for instance, if YouTube pulls the source, which they sometimes do, that APOD is forever broken). Ideally the material would be available from other sources and could be hosted locally (very easy with Flash videos). But if YouTube is the only source for a good APOD video, I don't know that the editors should categorically avoid it. Hopefully most users have enough experience with sites like YouTube to know that related video links come up after you play something, and not to think they are all endorsed by NASA or the APOD editors.

We live in a hyperlinked world.

Chris Peterson wrote:Hopefully most users have enough experience with sites like YouTube to know that related video links come up after you play something.

(my bold)

I know now.

But I clicked to another page right at the end of the video the first time I watched, so I never saw the links. A day later I played the video and did not click to another page immediately, there were the links, I was surprised, and I wondered how I had missed them before.

I watched a few linked videos before realizing they were not all of the same event, and then I saw that you can tell this from their titles in some cases. Now I'm informed on what I was dealing with.

I haven't considered myself part of the YouTube "culture", so I'm unfamiliar with its operation just as I was with phpBB not so long ago. I also avoided keeping my Flash player installed for a long time because IE finds it hard to swallow on my old pc and it's used mostly for advertisements anyway. But since I abandoned IE for Mozilla Firefox, the Flash player is tolerable (so that's one less excuse for avoiding YouTube).

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Apology to readers: The reference to IE finding Flash player hard to "swallow" may sound like cannibalism, but saying it "chokes" on it is just as bad, so what was I to do?