Better than YouTube?

Okay, not to beat a dead horse, but I just tried something by uploading a video on Photobucket. I was originally going to use it to host an image, but to my surprise they allowed for video hosting, as well.

And I think it does a better job than YouTube, personally.

Currently, here are the video formats that PhotoBucket accepts:

Supported video file types are 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, 3p, asf, avi, divx, dv, dvx, flv, moov, mov, mp4, mpeg4, mpg4, mpe, mpeg, mpg, qt, wmv, xvid.

Photobucket does recompress the video into a Flash (flv) video, so there may be some advantage to compressing to this format on the front end, then uploading (but I'm not 100% sure). But, it does give you all the standard links you're used to, such as "embed" and "direct link" that you can copy and paste into a blog.

This file is my 2007-2008 Demo Reel (I used it because it was available, and because a little shameless self-promotion never hurt anyone, right?). The original file (used for upload) was rendered with the following settings:

Quicktime (mov) format, Photo-JPEG compression
360x240 pixels, Millions of Colors
44.1 kHz 16 bit Stereo
File size: 70.3 MB

I used these settings for two reasons. One, because I needed something smaller than 100MB. Two, most web players re-size the video to dimensions similar to these, so it's best not to let them re-size and re-compress at the same time. The artifacting can get pretty severe if you take a full-size video (NTSC/PAL) and have the uploader (Photobucket, etc.) stuff it into a player for you.

After uploading to the various places, here are the results. You can choose for yourself!

PHOTOBUCKET UPLOAD



YOUTUBE UPLOAD


FACEBOOK UPLOAD (link only)

I am working on using the MySpace uploader to post my video as well, and will post the findings here.