Cueing up Google Video

I’m working on a presentation one of my colleagues is giving next week.  I had the idea to insert a well-known piece of TV history.  Thanks to sites like YouTube, Google Video, and MySpace, the video I wanted was easily found. Unfortunately, we’re using PowerPoint which presented its own set of challenges and that’s another story.   Ideally, I wanted to cue the video to start at a specific spot in my clip.  Sure, the whole clip is of itself entertaining, but I’m trying more and more to keep presentations direct, to the point, and tasteful.

After some searching, I discovered that Google Video now supports timecode linking.  Google Video uses the Flash Player and Adobe’s marketing name for timecode links is Cue Points.  Well, it turns out that this method works nicely if I want to show the video surrounded by the usual Google search box, links, and video information.  I didn’t.  I wanted to embed a video object that would preserve my cueing either in a web page or directly within my PowerPoint. 

Finally, I discovered Angsuman Chakraborty’s post on how to achieve just what I wanted using embedded Google Video.  Google makes the embedding easy, but not so much the cueing.  It took me a good hour of searching and URL hacking before I realized that it would have to be done in the FlashVars property of the Flash player if at all.  That turned out to be the key not only to solving my original problem, but also in creating a successful search in Google.  

I don’t frequently bemoan the weaknesses of brute-force search, as it’s been referred to in the digital library community.  Frankly, I don’t experience those weaknesses much.  However, this was certainly one of those times.