Video Hosting

Ever since I bought my DV Cam sometimes ago, I have created many trip videos with my friends which I would like to post them up. Lately free video hosting is picking up, and it is great new for me. Mei Ru introduced YouTube to me which I found is quite good, and I had read about Google Video as well. Both had its pros and cons, and it all depends on what you have and how would you like to utilize them.

Google Video

• Accept most video formats
• Accept upload of any size
• Have a batch upload program for upload (can be continued upon disconnection or failure)
• Allow you to charge for video viewing
• Uses Flash to view video (before this it require a proprietary video plug-in download)
• Took a day or two to approve and host your video
• The categorisation of video type is very limited (sometimes irrelevant of what I have to offer, yet I am forced to select 3 unrelated categories)
• When viewing the video, the player stretch the video too much until pixelisation happened (the player view's size follow your browser's window size. Imagine you are running a screen resolution of 1024 and above, crazy pixelisation shall happen. The only thing you could do to save this is to reduce your browser viewing size)
• Somehow, Google Video seems too serious and commercial

YouTube

• Accept most video format
• Accept upload up to 100 MB
• Doesn't have a batch upload program (using web interface for upload, not suitable to upload big file and you shall curse upon disconnection or failure during upload)
• Uses Flash to view video
• Approve and host your video almost instantly
• Allow you to tag your video (like Flickr, folksonomy)
• Allow you to embed a video player of your video in your web page or blog (Cool!)
  
• Somehow, YouTube seems more community friendly with more interesting videos hosted

Personally, I like YouTube, but she doesn't suit my current requirements. I have many videos made into VCD format (MPEG1), and each chunk of it easily exceed 100 MB. Besides, my upload speed is only 256 Kbps and YouTube upload mechanism is too hostile for me. Google Video makes it easy to upload big video files. Perhaps YouTube should increase their size limit and create a better batch upload utility? At the moment, I shall upload most of my videos to Google Video, and perhaps some small ones to YouTube.

Stay tuned for more "His Videos". Coming Soon!