Video Hosting: AVI Upload Test

Today I'm going to post the same .avi video clip, taken with my Canon S400 digital camera, to four different video hosting providers.

.mac provides hosting for Macintosh owners.

vblogcentral and vimeo. I'm a beta tester for them.

audioblog.com recently started hosting videos and currently has a free trial going on.

I'm going to upload this video clip to show you how you do it and what the results are.

.mac ( for macintosh users )

.mac has a drag and drop interface that's built right into the browser. I love this. All you do is drag and drop your video file onto the icon for your remote .mac disk, and the file gets copied. Simple.

Original .avi clip room_view.avi [ opens in new window ]

Pros: Drag and Drop interface. A quick and easy way to post a video.
Cons: Not integrated with blogger or TypePad. There are other blogging tools that interface with .mac though.

vblogcentral

With vblogcentral the interface is drag-and-drop. You take the file and drop it onto the uploader, and select a thumbnail image. Then you fill in the blog post title and text. Press publish.

vblogcentral then uploads the video file, converts it into QuickTime, Real and Windows Media Player versions and posts it to your blog for playing in an embedded window.

The video is uploaded to the blog associated with your account when you signed up.

Here's the result.

Pros: Drag and Drop interface, automatic conversion of videos, embeded player, automatically adds enclosure tag for video aggregators like ANT.
Cons: No cut and paste into Blog title entry field, extraneous player control display in uploader, video thumbnail in blog post displays no video player control image, video resizing adds degradation in image quality ( this doesn't happen though with larger QuickTime source movies )

audioblog.com

With audioblog.com the interface is web based. You click the browse button to select your file, give it a title and description, and then press the Upload File button.

After you've uploaded the video, you can re-edit it's title and description or publish it to a blog or RSS feed. Select the blog that you want to publish to from a list of your blogs that was set up automatically when you joined audioblog.com and press publish.

Now you can see what your video is going to look like, it's been converted to Flash for you. Next you add a blog title and post body (required), and press publish.

Here's the result.

Pros: Automatic conversion to Flash, allows posting to any of your listed blogs, nice embedded player
Cons: No way to copy video title and description to blog post title and description, Thumbnail is automatically the first frame of your video, post body is required, no enclosure tag support although it is planned.

vimeo

This is a web based interface where you browse your local disk to select a video for upload. Then you give your video a filename.

Videos must be in .mov format, so you've got to convert them first. I use Sorenson Squeeze, but you can use QuickTime Pro.

After clicking upload, and the video is uploaded, you are sent to your video page, where your most recent video is on top. Click the video and you can then add tags, which allow you to have your clip show in vimeos automatic movies which are made up of tags that people have assigned to their movies.

Here's the result.

Pros: Fastest upload, straighforward interface
Cons: .mov support only, Beta test version limits you posting a link from your blog to the video on vimeo although you could take a screen grab and link to it, no RSS 2.0 enclosure support