A little over a year ago, Flickr flaunted its video uploading capabilities. Although the features were limited, they got off to a pretty good start, and had also made it clear through these limitations that they weren’t competing with Youtube. But now, Flickr has upped their game a little by changing the rules.

Earlier, only pro users were able to upload videos after paying a fee of $30 for a period of 25 years. Now the pro users can finally upload HD videos, and their previous clips will be reprocessed, so that they can be played on the spanking new 16:9 HD player. The video feature will also be made free to non-paying users, although the HD facility will not be made available to them. Instead, their HD videos will have to be played on the standard SD player.

The only limitations that Flickr still has to get rid of are the size restriction, which is still only 150 MB per file, and the 90 sec length restriction. This is going to be a nuisance, and a lot of users will still prefer Youtube to this, due to convenience. Another point to be noted is that Flickr has taken of the limit of sets that free users can create, the previous limit being 3. Although they have done this, free users can upload a maximum of 2 videos a month, which is quite disappointing.

Another feature that Flickr is adding is the Flickr clock, which will enable users to view videos according to the time they were recorded. This has been done by manually adding a special “machine tag”, which lets the system know exactly what time the videos were taken.

So far, Flickr has made some changes that have been appreciated by users, but they still have a long way to go, as there are still several limitations.