‘InstaChooser’ lets you import videos into Instagram

I think it’s safe to say that Instagram’s foray into video, as delayed as it may have been, has turned out to be a resounding success. Many of the folks I follow on Instagram have happily embraced the new video feature, and services like Vine have suffered as a result.

Now it’s time for the jailbreak community to have their say. The first jailbreak release to alter the functionality of Instagram video is InstaChooser. InstaChooser is a tweak that allows you to import videos from your device’s Camera Roll right into Instagram. This allows you to mix and match video created outside of Instagram along with the service’s own video authoring tools.

InstaChooser is not perfect, but it works decently enough to suit the needs of those who absolutely must have importing capabilities. Have a look at our full video walkthrough inside for the details…

After installation, you’ll notice a new button on the video authoring page for importing video from the Camera Roll. The design of the tweak leaves much to be desired, as it sticks out like a sore thumb next to Instagram’s slick UI. Importing video is fairly seamless, even if you do have to deal with ridiculous prompts each time you wish to insert an outside clip (see our video above to see what I mean).

InstaChooser does feature a preference panel, but it contains nothing more than a simple kill switch, and that kill switch requires that you close out of Instagram each time you use it. Again, it’s not the most elegant experience, but this is pretty much the only option for those that wish to insert outside video.

The actual process for importing outside video works well, but it’s not without its own set of shortcomings. First of all, you can only insert video, not images. That should go without saying, but inserting images will cause the app to crash. InstaChooser does allow you to insert more than one clip at a time, but if the total is longer than Instagram’s 15 second limit, the app will crash before publishing. The app will also crash if you don’t have at least some of the content created from within Instagram. Lastly, I should mention that during the cover selection, only the material created within Instagram can be seen. In the end, your outside clip will be uploaded for all to see.

With everything taken into account, InstaChooser feel very much like a hack that was thrown together in haste to accommodate someone’s needs. It feels like it was quickly developed and hastily released without much polish or testing going into the process. Yes, it works, but it’s a very crude process filled with anomalies, annoying and repetitive prompts, and of course, crashes. In other words, proceed at your own risk.

If you want to give InstaChooser a try, then venture over to Cydia’s BigBoss repo where it can be downloaded for $0.99. Obviously, you must have Instagram installed on your device with the latest video support updates in order to successfully take advantage of InstaChooser’s import feature. Let me know what you think about InstaChooser in the comment section below.

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Video On Instagram Is Already A Smashing Success, And Here’s Why Clips Are 15 Seconds Long

Instagram added support for sharing 15-second video clips yesterday, and the feature has been available in the App Store and Google Play for a little over 24 hours. Twitter’s Vine app is already a pretty established video sharing network with 13 million+ users, so you would think that Instagram has some catching up to do. O wait… Instagram has 130,000 million users. Right.

Enough videos were uploaded within the first eight hours of release that it would take you a year to watch them all. Also, there’s a reason clips are 15 seconds long.

“At peak, Instagram users uploaded 40 hours of video per minute. The climactic moment came Thursday night as the Miami Heat defeated the San Antonio Spurs during the NBA Finals,” according to CNET. That’s a lot of video. Keep in mind that users on the previous version of Instagram can’t create videos or even view them in their feeds, so this activity was all from users who had manually updated to version 4.0 after the announcement yesterday.

These kinds of numbers highlight Instagram’s biggest advantage over Vine: a massive, loyal, and incredibly active user base. Vine has only been out for a few months, and while it looks like some neat features are coming that Instagram doesn’t currently have, Twitter’s budding social network may have already had its time in the sun.

An Instagram with 15-second videos is right in the sweet spot for Facebook: It’s mobile, it’s video, and at that length, it means that advertisers can drop in their short television spots without even modifying them. This is an important but overlooked feature of online video ads, when compared to other kinds like banner and search: the ability to re-use the same creative on which advertisers have already spent so much money. That’s an extremely appealing advantage to ad buyers.Back to Instagram. An interesting post on Quartz explains why video clips are 15-seconds long. Instagram seemingly chose to go with a length that’s more than double Vine’s six seconds for a specific reason: ads. Video ads have already been in the works for Facebook, which owns Instagram, and 15 seconds is the exact format that a lot of big advertisers use for TV already.

Right after Instagram turned on video yesterday, Lululemon used the feature for an ad on its company account. How clever.

The good news is that you can turn off auto-play for videos under your Instagram profile options.

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Facebook Introduces Video On Instagram

Today is a big day for Instagram users. Just right now Facebook has just finished its media event and it introduced a new feature in Instagram, from now you will be able to upload and share video clips on the service. It’s unclear whether the video uploading capability will be available through the web interface.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Video on Instagram and bring you another way to share your stories. When you go to take a photo on Instagram, you’ll now see a movie camera icon. Tap it to enter video mode, where you can take up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera.

You’ll also find that we’ve added thirteen filters built specifically for video so you can keep sharing beautiful content on Instagram. When you post a video, you’ll also be able to select your favorite scene from what you’ve recorded as your cover image so your videos are beautiful even when they’re not playing.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post that posting a video also lets you select your favorite scene from what you’ve recorded as your cover image, a poster frame of sorts.

And if you’re on an iPhone 4S or iPhone 5, a Cinema feature will automatically stabilize a shaky video after you take it. To disable stabilization (it’s on by default), tap the shaky camera icon.

Keep in mind that video requires an iPhone 3GS device or newer running iOS 5.0 or later or an Android 4.1 or later smartphone.

You can easily share your video directly from the app, which is a shame. Another downer: you also can’t tag people in your Instagram videos. And no, you can’t embed Instagram videos in web pages either.

Instagram is available free from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store for Android.

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