Google Docs Launches Video Sharing and Playback

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Google Docs, the convenient tool for reading and writing documents and creating spreadsheets online, announced this week that it’s adding video sharing and playback to its ever-growing list of capabilities.

This means that videos can now be embedded and played in documents themselves. Videos can be up to 1GB in size, and the file types supported include MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files, WebM files, .avi, MPEGPS, WMV and Adobe .flv files. Videos are uploaded in a simple YouTube-like uploader, and once they’re stored online, they can be viewed with one simple click.

One of the benefits of this new capability is its convenience. Instead of having to download a video and play it in a separate browser, users will now be able to stream the video within their browsers on Google Docs (provided that they’ve downloaded Flash). Another plus? Streaming video in Google Docs is also a great tool for working on group video projects, since previous versions of the video can be downloaded.

And as fears of sharing too much on the Internet mount, Google Docs’ new video capability also provides a bit more privacy–videos can be streamed and shared in a document without becoming publicly available, as they are on YouTube and Facebook.

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