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.

why not both?

[moderatorrater]

Hit up youtube to give it exposure and link to your webpage where you provide a torrent for the better quality files. Put some simple ads on that page and you're good to go.

Vimeo

[Peganthyrus]

I mostly see things pop up on Vimeo when people don't want to post them on Youtube for quality reasons.

SimpleCDN

[Stile 65]

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.

imeem.com has pretty darn good video

[illectro]

imeem.com supports 'Near DVD Quality' in their own words, and they just use s flash player. Most people use imeem for sharing mp3s but the video quality is pretty good too.

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.

Try the higher quality YouTube

[DreadfulGrape]

YouTube has a "high quality" video upload option. I've watched a few - most of them are pretty good. Might be suitable for your purposes, and of course, universally accessible. Check it out:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=91450

Here's what I've seen done

[jollyreaper]

Put the crappy version up on Youtube. It lets people see what you're about and whether they'd like to have a better version.

Now here's the trick: in the video description area, include a link to a torrent tracker with the higher quality version. Seed it yourself to get the ball rolling, watch it take off from there.

I've seen people who make game videos do that sort of thing, like when it's show-off clips or game music videos and the like.

The advantage of doing it this way is you increase the stumble-on factor by being on Youtube and people can see your video in seconds. Those who care enough to demand the higher-quality version will have the torrent link and be very happy. All around, win-win. Now aside from using a p2p app and thus directly supporting the terrorists, you're all set.

Streaming does not allow high quality

[xiando]

I distribute video using BitTorrent because that allows me to distribute video in very high quality. It is also my preference when viewing Internet video. Why insist on making the users view video files in their web browser? I personally prefer to view videos using a video player (mplayer/xine/vlc/etc) and I even download videos from web video sites like youtube (youtube-dl) and view them this way. Streaming in good quality does not scale well, and it does not work well with many software combinations (different OS, web browsers, etc). Most users seem to know how to download a video file using BitTorrent, so why not use that standard? If you really want to allow users to stream videos then give them a low quality flash video (like YouTube) and offer them to download a high-quality MPEG4 ("divx")/DVD ISO video file. This would allow those who prefer to view videos in their browsers to do so while also allowing people like me to download and view the high-quality version at my leisure. I do not think high-quality web browser viewed streaming video is possible, so consider the next best thing, low quality streaming with the option of downloading a high quality version.

Self fulfilling prophecy?

[Craptastic Weasel]

Or you could post a question to Slashdot, in which your user name links to your site, and within that site is a link to the video.

I think this is the video.

I know (or believe, rather) this wasn't your intention, but I am working on the coveted "Commander of the Obvious" award for most obvious solution. :)

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

Try your best to future-proof it

[TheModelEskimo]

I would upload one copy to a couple of streaming video sites like Youtube and Vimeo. Once you've done that, take your highest-res copy and any other material you want to share, and upload to archive.org. That way, if people want to watch on their own terms, the video is available in a huge digital library that tries to invest in digital permanence. Be clear about the licensing terms and leave your contact information.

duh!

[jagdish]

Name it "xxx-porn" and spread it on the interwebs.

Re:Youtube has ruined reputation of flash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes! The reputation of Flash. Such a highbrow platform, associated with such professional content as "Punch the Monkey" ads and so-called "websites" with zero HTML content.

Too bad Youtube shattered our image of Flash.

DivX is NO FORMAT!

[Hurricane78]

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).

Re:DivX is NO FORMAT!

[Wildclaw]

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.

Re:DivX is NO FORMAT!

[DigitAl56K]

Matroska is the best generic container format (replacing the flawed avi) as well as open standard and open source based.

Matroska is nice, but AVI is not "flawed". Lots of people dislike AVI and can't explain why, only that they have heard others also saying that it is "flawed". AVI has supported a wide range of compressors including DivX and Xvid for many years successfully. AVI is certainly not best suited to H.264 but given that AVI, introduced in 1992, stems from IFF, first introduced by Electronic Arts in 1985, you can hardly call that a flaw. The main technical challenge that AVI writers have to deal with is correctly writing VBR audio streams - an issue that has already been addressed for many, many years.

Maybe you can explain why you think AVI is "flawed"?

Torrent.

[DrYak]

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

If the link points to a torrent, the site is even more likely to be able to withstand lots of users downloading the video.

That's what torrent where designed to begin with (before the format became also popular on sites like pirate bay) : to enable content provider to distribute huge files without killing too much bandwidth.

All the poster has to do is to send some way or another (using a plain HTTP link, or sending burned CD-R through snail-mail) the file to a small amount of friends who could all seed the file initially and everything will be ok.