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?"

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.

Don't forget ownership!

[sudnshok]

I believe many of these video sharing sites claim rights to anything you post. You may want to keep that in mind when choosing (if that matters to you).

Re:Try your best to future-proof it

[Anonymous Coward]

I also use Internet Archive (archive.org). I can upload my video in one defacto standard format (*.wmv), they convert it to one or more (mpeg4), and people can download whichever they prefer. I specifically avoided Google and YouTube because of their proprietary codecs/ viewers.

HTH,

David Christensen
[e-mail]

Re:Vimeo

[terjeber]

It excludes those who have any 64 bit OS other than Windows.

Actually, no, it doesn't. Flash is available for most of these platforms. Flash is not available in a 64 bit version for 64 bit anything (including Windows) but neither are the majority of browsers on the market today unless you are an expert. If you are an expert you really should not have a problem at all running flash on your 64 bit computer. I run Flash on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, all of them (sorta) 64 bit OSs.

As it comes to universality, Flash has broader coverage than any other distribution mechanism in the real world today, and therefore Flash would be the appropriate choice for Web distribution.

Re:DivX is NO FORMAT!

[Snaller]

"But why would you use such an outdated and non-free codec in the first place, "

Because it is supported in hardware everywhere, there is tons of (user friendly) software for it and there is a great browser plugin in in for it.

"There are x264, XviD, Theora as video encoders,
Matroska and Ogg as containers,"

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.

"And nowadays eveybody who watches downloaded films has those on his disk anyway"

I doubt that, they avoid them to begin with. But presumably those who use hardware wouldn't go near it.

Re:DivX is NO FORMAT!

[rtechie]

But why would you use such an outdated and non-free codec in the first place, when there are enough alternatives.

Compatibility. Next to nothing uses Theora and Vorbis, and Matroska and Ogg are very obscure container formats that require codec packs to be installed AND only work on a handful of platforms. For example, Matroska only works properly on Windows.

Performance. H.264 and Divx/Xvid are relatively CPU intensive, especially H.264. So if you want to play your video on older hardware or handhelds, these codecs are right out. I still encode stuff in MPEG 1 for this reason.

Re:Streaming does not allow high quality

[TubeSteak]

Most users seem to know how to download a video file using BitTorrent, so why not use that standard?

Uhhh... no. Most users don't.
Most users have never even heard of bittorrent.
Bittorrent is not a standard. Not by far.

If you're not giving the masses streaming video, they're helpless.
Even right-click + save is to complicated for a lot of people.

Re:Vimeo

[corsec67]

Firefox on Ubuntu 64-bit is 64-bit.

Why would ANY 64-bit distro default to 32-bit browsers? Wouldn't that defeat the point of even having a 64-bit distro, and require fragile compatibility libraries?