Video Hosting: YouTube, Google, or Yahoo?

After buying a Flickr pro account for storing both of my photos, I was left with a minor problem: video clips. So, I tried out YouTube, Google Video, and Yahoo! Video, which are free (ad-supported) services. I list the pros and cons below, but I must note that the test has at least one weakness: the best resolution of my material was 320×240. I’ll review this entry as soon as I get a Sanyo Xacti HD1A. Don’t hold your breath, though.

Yahoo! Video (♥)

• – size limit 100 MB
• – no privacy control (all clips are public; this is so cheap..)
• – less metadata
• – bad sound quality
• – doesn’t support 3gp (mobile video)
• (+ probably supports 640×480, but they didn’t state and I couldn’t test)

Google Video (♥♥; best for hi-fi videos)

• + no size limit was informed (at least much greater than 100 MB)
• + supports 640×480 resolution
• + desktop uploader (which I didn’t try out)
• + mid-video linking
• – no privacy control
• – no upload progress indicator (should probably use the uploader)
• – less metadata

YouTube (♥♥♥; best for lo-fi videos)

• + privacy control
• + best metadata
• – video size limit 100 MB
• – poorest video quality (which I couldn’t actually verify, but I assume that YouTube scales all video down to the 320×240 resolution)
• – is YouTube going to stay alive?

By no surprise, none of the services provided the possibility to preserve the original quality of the video. (Downloading is possible, though.) So, all them are really about sharing videos, and not for backup. Currently, the best option for backup seems to be Amazon S3 with Jungle Disk. It works well, but sharing is awkward, and it costs $0.15/GB/mo. For example, 10 hours of fine quality video costs $72/yr (not exactly free), but with quality that is not possible to achieve with the free services; and perhaps there’s hope that the prices drop. Ok, you may hog Gmail accounts and use GDrive/GMail Drive; and so forward.

So, use YouTube if quality is not an issue (mobile video; I’m planning on getting an E70), or pay the book shop. Google Video is the compromise.

(PS. YouTube, please provide a pro account for preserving the original quality! And to have unlimited video size. There you have the business model also…)

Update 09/04: i) Google video is very strict about what videos it let’s to be shared. My completely harmless test clip was rejected later. What a pity.
ii) With Jungle Disk it’s practically impossible to get the files shared. NS3 Manager is better in that sense, but I can’t get one 100 MiB file uploaded because of some XML parsing error. (It’s a .net application, so this wasn’t really a surprise.) I have no better solutions to offer here, sorry. The rest of the S3 applications seemed more or less inappropriate.

Tags: internet, services