Google Now Playbacks Video Search Results

It's been known since April that Google was collecting video clips from the users in order to include them in its Google Video Search Service.

However, Google's ambition goes beyond indexing several thousands or hundred thousands video clips, and today the search engine has announced the launch of Google Video Viewer, a 1MB application which allows the viewing of video clips found by means of Google Video Search directly in the browser.

Google Video Viewer is actually based on the code of an open-source program called Video Lan Client, also known as VLC, whose current version is 0.82.

VLC is not a very popular program, especially due to its rather primitive and unfriendly interface, but it has some qualities which represent an excellent starting point for the Google Video Viewer.

VLC is available for all the major platforms and has excellent streaming video capabilities, which is actually the program's main function.

Google Video Viewer is actually an integration of the VLC in the main browsers and although only the test 1 version is available for now, it seems to be working perfectly. Having been tested with both IE and FireFox, Google Video Viewer has opened quite rapidly the video content obtained from Google Video Search and the playback has been flawless on a 256 kbps connection.

It's not quite clear yet where the VLC code ends and the Google code begins, but what's really important is that Google Video Viewer is doing an excellent job and is probably going to be improved quite soon.

The only problem it had was that the image froze for a few seconds when going from browser mode to full screen mode.

Download Google Video Viewer