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Best Way To Distribute Video Online?

Posted by timothy on from the just-assume-others-will-mirror dept.

CHAMELEON_D_H writes "For some time now, I've been working on a short, geek/nerd oriented animation. It's nearing completion, and I'm starting to look for a method to share it with anyone willing to spare a minute. There are dozens of video sharing and streaming sites out there, making my choice very difficult. Looking for the best possible video and audio quality, while still having vast OS and browser compatibility leaves me dumbfounded. Having a download link would be a great bonus. Youtube is the default and most common choice, but has mediocre video quality and resolution. DivX Web Player has astounding quality, but requires users to download DivX's plugin and forces me to find hosting or purchase more bandwidth, as they no longer serve videos via stage6. Do Slashdotters have any experience with sharing or uploading videos? Problems you've encountered? What do your eyes say about different streaming video sites?"

3 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. SimpleCDN by Stile+65 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Flat fee per upload. Plus you get 15 credits just for registering.

    http://simplecdn.com/

    Their MirrorCDN option is also nice, depending on what you're doing. $.07/GB is less than half of what S3 charges for transfer rates.

    --
    I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
  2. DivX is NO FORMAT! by Hurricane78 · · Score: 5, Informative

    DivX is a CODEC (enCOder+DECoder) for the MPEG4 video format.
    You can play DivX encoded videos with every MPEG4-compatible decoder.
    Every other information is only deliberate disinformation by DivX Inc. to sell you their trash.

    But why would you use such an outdated and non-free codec in the first place, when there are enough alternatives.
    There are x264, XviD, Theora as video encoders,
    Matroska and Ogg as containers,
    Vorbis, MP3 and too many other formats and encoders to count for audio.

    And nowadays eveybody who watches downloaded films has those on his disk anyway (except maybe for Theora and the Ogg DirectVideo demuxer).

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    1. Re:DivX is NO FORMAT! by Wildclaw · · Score: 5, Informative

      XVid is basically the same as Divx so that is fine, but the rest are weird non standard junk not supported in very much. That's something you reencode to avi as fast as possible if you can't get it in avi to start with.

      Non standard junk? x264 is an encoder for h264, which happens to be the standard format for high quality video.

      Matroska is the best generic container format (replacing the flawed avi) as well as open standard and open source based. It does suffer somewhat from not being the industry (as in big business) standard, but on merits it is the best on the market, and with the increasing use to distribute high definition content in the scene, improved hardware support is very likely.

      The mpeg container format (.mp4 - can't remember its real name right now) is industry supported which means that it is implemented in more hardware, but compared to Matroska it is less flexible. Still, when using h264, I won't blaim any business for going with that format, even though I prefer to use Matroska for all my encoding.

      As for Ogg and Theora, they are far less common. Ogg is pretty much dead in the water. Matroska simply won over it at the start, and ogg has never been able to recover from that. Theora is nice in that it isn't patent encumbered, which is a plus for businesses that need to think about licenses, but to be honest it will have a hard time replacing h264 or its older sibling mpeg4 (divx,xvid). The usage for theora lies in specialized software playback such as games, where the playback engine is included and license fees can be troublesome.