Best Way To Distribute Video Online?

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?"

Comments

Why Not Various Formats & Qualities?

[eldavojohn]

My starving artist friend in NYC developed a short video on his mac and was faced with exactly this dilemma. So he sent out an e-mail with a link to the site where he was hosting a portal page. He simply said in the page that you could go watch the embedded YouTube video he had there if you didn't care about quality (and to be honest, his video really didn't require it) but then said that if you were a quality snob or if you couldn't make out the YouTube video, you could click the links.

At the bottom, he had a list of various Quicktime sizes. One was pretty much HD and he said that if you didn't have a large high quality display that you should just go for the medium version. He also pointed out you could download them by right clicking if (and his provider is horrendous) you got choppy video.

Nobody brought his site to his knees, 90% of the people probably just watched the YouTube video and everyone could watch it.

You could do a similar thing, hell you could even point out that you don't need to install QuickTime or a DIVX codec if you just watch from the portal page or visit YouTube.

Remember, you may be a quality snob but your audience isn't always so I would leave the choice to them. Is there something about your video that makes it look unbearable on YouTube? Is the animation and its features really that detailed and fine?

If it is, I have another idea. I don't know how this works but I buy my Cinematic Titanic dvds from EZ-Takes (also known as DVD Wagon) and it looks like they'll sell anything on there for a low price. You could contact a company that sells streaming video or DVD ISOs for low prices like $1 and then just not get anything for profit and use them as a cheap host for your audience. You might not see profits but you'll retain the rights to your video/audio and have a way someone can spend a dollar and get the highest quality possible from you. There's probably a more reliable company to do this through, I just know of EZ Takes.

personal experience...

[Dzimas]

I like blip.tv or vimeo. Both offer significantly higher quality than YouTube. The only hassle with blip is that you have to pay to get "premium" encoding, although the free version works just fine if you're patient enough to wait a few hours.

However, it may make more sense to host the file yourself (you can use something like Amazon's AWS to serve gigabytes of content for hardly anything) using any of a number of excellent embedded video viewers. This gives you absolute control over your media, which is a surprisingly valuable commodity. If your animation turns out to be popular, your site could see hundreds of thousands - or even millions - of visits. That can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars of revenue. On the other hand, if you upload your film to YouTube, you're going to hand over that advertising revenue to Google and walk away empty handed. Honestly, "social media" sites are a fool's game - You do all the hard work, someone else profits.

Bittorrent streaming now available

[molo]

You can now stream over bittorrent. This works by prioritizing earlier segments in the file and combining the bittorrent client with the media player.

See here:

    http://trial.p2p-next.org/
    http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/27/eztv-allows-bittorrent-streaming/

-molo

What kind of quality does your animation need?

[billstewart]

Animation is *such* a broad space. Some kinds of animation don't need much resolution or bandwidth, e.g. South Park. Other kinds might want lots of pixels or at least wide format, but they're still fairly low bandwidth, e.g. cartoons with lots of things in them or landscapy shapes. But there are kinds of animation where you really do need more quality/bandwidth, e.g. you're starting with photo images and doing interesting things with lighting that you want to show off.

Depending on what you're doing, it may be that YouTube, or YouTube in full-screen mode, may be enough, or it may not, and Youtube's been talking about handling higher-resolution video as well.

Infinovision is #1

[superpauldiddy]

It used to be Vimeo, but now it's Infinovision. Their player is nicer, it extracts thumbnails of the video and places them on the progress bar so you can preview and seek there. Also they don't have an upload size restriction, and support true seeking not just progressive downloading like Vimeo. It's super high quality, and you can brand the player with your own logo which is cool. They even built a Youtube-esque user submitted video content Joomla component called JVideo. Which uses their stuff so you can run your own Youtube site for free just by installing their stuff. You can basically just upload videos into their dashboard and pull out embed code at the bare minimum, or you can use their API to integrate it into your site too.

They don't have a public gallery like Vimeo does, you have to embed the stuff on your own sites or use their API. They're better suited for giving the illusion of you running your own video system though since they encourage you to brand the player.

Re:Vimeo

[MsGeek]

This is the home for almost all of my videos. They won't take AMVs or mashups so I still have to upload those to YouTube. But anything original? Vimeo all the way.