Tech knowledge about video

Below is a quick rundown of many the top video sharing web sites. For help choosing the video sharing solution that's right for you, read the article, Things to Consider When Choosing a Video Sharing Site.

1. YouTube

Appeal: The video-sharing site everyone's already heard of. Mindshare-winner by a mile.

Interface: Tabbed pages feature ratings, favorites, flagging, tagging, and commenting. Create playlists, subscribe to other's uploads, subscribe to tags. The player only features a mute button (rather than level control), and full-screening the video opens a new window and starts playback over.

Editing: None.

Sharing: Embed in other websites, including Friendster, eBay, Blogger, MySpace.

Verdict: Easy to use, no major issues. Decent video quality, audio sounds compressed. Video embedded in Wordpress fine (but was off-center). But: No progress bar for uploading. Fairly lengthy "processing" delay before you (or anyone else) can watch your video.

2. Eyespot

Appeal: Easy-to-use video uploading and remixing.

Interface: Bright and colorful. Tagging, forums, groups. Not a lot of community features.

Editing: Trim beginning and end, reorder clips on a timeline, add music and photos.

Sharing: Post to a group, invite a friend to the service (but not directly to your clip).

Verdict: Uploading straightforward and painless. But: 25MB filesize limit too small. Mashup features fall short of Grouper's "groovies," and it's not even in the same ballpark as Jumpcut when it comes to mixing and editing. Not a lot of reason to use Eyespot, in its current incarnation.

3. Google Video

Appeal: It's Google.

Interface: Typically clean and sparse Google layout. Uploading requires you download the Google Video Uploader. Allows you to add plenty of metadata, including a transcript. You can monetize your content by assigning a sale price to each clip (you can also give users a "day pass," giving them access to the content for a limited time, but not ownership).

Editing: None.

Sharing: See below.

Verdict: Google Video requires a "video verification" process, where your submission is reviewed to ensure it conforms to Google's technical standards and legal policies. This process "may take several days," so check back for an update.

4. Vimeo

Appeal: Flickr for video.

Interface: Nice and clean, uses a flash wrapper to play native formats. No download required, simple and easy uploads. Tagging, commenting, voting. Nice player with a volume control and no burned-in logo.

Editing: None in the current version.

Sharing: Post to Flickr, send to del.icio.us, download original file, embed in your MySpace profile or blog, create an RSS feed.

Verdict: Good video quality. Embedding the video in Wordpress worked flawlessly. But: Light on community features, and weekly storage cap of 20 megs is too limiting.

5. vSocial

Appeal: "The fastest, easiest way to upload, watch and share your favorite video clips."

Interface: All Web 2.0'd-out. Big fonts, AJAX, tagging, rating, reviewing, RSS feeds, creative commons licenses.

Editing: Offers "edit this video" functionality, which I couldn't test (see below). Can also create "Video Rolls," which are customized playlists generated from your selected criteria.

Sharing: Embed in your own page, MySpace, Typepad, Blogger, del.icio.us, Flickr, Blog It! (write a post on your own blog about a video without leaving vSocial).

Verdict: Lots of community features. But: Didn't live up to their "fastest" or "easiest" claim--I never successfully got a video uploaded (tried three times). Quality of existing clips is less than stellar--everything's resized to 320X240. Your mileage may vary, but even with a Quicktime file that uploaded to other sites without a problem, I never got vSocial to work.

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