Our new digital camera takes some amazing-quality video, but how do I share it? Since a 10 second video clip is ~25MB I can’t just stick it up on my server and hope for the best. So I decided to try a couple of free video hosting options.
I decided to start by comparing Google video and YouTube. Here’s a breakdown of some others out there.
I found YouTube a better user experience. Sign up was quick and the interface reminds me of Flickr. Google video required a 12-15 hour wait for my video to be approved. Both sites too about the same time to upload the video. YouTube gives you a 100MB per video size limit.
I’m using an 11 second 640x480x30fps 28MB .avi video sample (16bit 44kHz stereo audio) from my Canon S2IS that I will use to test. It’s a video of some pigeons eating seed next to the sidewalk on Bank Street in Ottawa. I shot it a couple days ago on my way into work.
Here’s a screenshot of uncompressed video to compare {I reduced the size from 640x480px to 450px wide}:
The original is much better quality than both web versions. Other S2IS examples on video.google.com look much closer to the real quality. I’m not sure why this is, but I think it has to do with the complex ground and feather markings. I’d bet more uniform colours makes the compression work a lot better.
Here’s the google video:
And this is the YouTube version:
They look pretty much the same to me. It’s not broadcast quality {we’ll have to wait for IPTV for that…} but these video services are fast and easy {not to mention cheap} ways to share video online.
Hi there – another difference (as far as I can tell) between Google Video and YouTube, is that Google Video has recently started to allow its users to download original versions of the uploaded material. YouTube doesn’t seem to allow this…?
It’s pretty easy to do. YouTube uses Flash to deliver the content so I needed a flash embedding plug in for WP which was a bit tricky. The Google video was easier
as it’s not Flashit worked with just some< code >< / code >tags around it.As far as applications I think it would be great for media coverage. Google video is obviously indexed and searchable via google, and YouTube gets Flickr-sized traffic {although usually to see videos like this}.
Great test. I love the way you are able to incorporate it right into a blog post. Is it difficult to do? I can see applications in the future for us in the PR industry. We do media training with clients all the time on video. We could post their sessions, feedback, etc. on a blog that only they could access. Also, how about creating an online media coverage report for clients that shows their video coverage?
Wait until Joe sees this….he’ll forget all about the WP 2.0 upgrade!