Last week Skype 3.5 for Windows came out--one of the neat features it adds is better integration with video. You can share videos from Dailymotion and Metacafe in your mood message and in text chats, and they'll play back in the Skype client. This is great, but sometimes the videos you want to share aren't on either of those services. If that's the case, I'd like to share a work-around you might want to check out.

If the video you like is on YouTube or Revver or any other service, you can download it from that site and then upload it to Metacafe or Dailymotion. Of course, any submissions you make need to meet the copyright rules of the site you're submitting to, so the best use of this is for video you've made or taken when you don't have the source files handy.

1. Download the video with KeepVid. You need to input the video's main URL and then save the file (be sure to give it a .FLV extension).

2. Upload your FLV file to Metacafe. I'm suggesting Metacafe because when I tried to upload my FLV file to Dailymotion it had an encoding error and didn't work, but your mileage may vary. When you upload the file you describe it, tag it, and choose a thumbnail. After your video is uploaded, note that you can't share it immediately--you have to wait for the Metacafe community to approve it and for it to get indexed properly (searches in Skype might not immediately find it).

3. Share it in Skype. You can add your video to chats and to your mood message by clicking on the video icons (to the right in your mood message and above where you enter text in chat windows) and then searching for your video with the tags you gave it.

When you're submitting video in the future, check out TubeMogul--it submits your video to many popular video sites (including Dailymotion and Metacafe) at the same time, and gives you a way to track viewing data from all the sites in a single place.