Top Video Sharing Sites Reviewed

prostoalex writes "Digital Video Guru is running a comparison of 10 digital video sharing sites - EyeSpot Beta, Google Video Beta, Grouper Beta, Jumpcut Beta, OurMedia, Revver Beta, VideoEgg, Vimeo, vSocial and YouTube. Currently, based on traffic, YouTube is the leader of the pack (more heavily visited MSN Video does not support user-uploaded videos), but Digital Video Guru blog awards Vimeo for fastest uploads, JumpCut for editing, and YouTube for community features."

check calibration+gamma settings

[SuperBanana]

At first I thought it was my version of flash. But even after getting the latest, those videos are still too dark. To make matters worse, there does not seem to be an effort to sort this issue out. We need some common video controls on some these videos for sure.

If you're using Windows, you probably don't have the correct color profile selected for your display, or you're using the wrong gamma setting. Or you're using Linux, and don't have the gamma set properly (X does not default to a reasonable gamma- it defaults to 2.4 or something, when Windows is 2.2.) Note that you can't use "2.2" as a parameter- you have to give it something like "1.2" or similar. Google "linux gamma" etc.

Macs also sometimes default to goofy profiles, so check under "Color" in the Displays control panel.

I've never had a problem with video brightness on google video, but I am using a calibrated display on an OSX macbook (and Dell monitor- yes, both are calibrated.)

Re:What about downloading

[roye]

Keepvid.com [keepvid.com] might help you there. It gives you the link for easy saving. You might need that viewer for the Flashvideo files depending on your setup.

Re:What about downloading

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh... Just use Firefox with the Grease Monkey Extension. The YouTube to Me script allows you to save all the files in a .flv format. VLC plays those files just fine.

Get a fucking clue before you post.

Re:What about downloading

[Travelsonic]

http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php [javimoya.com] - Video Downloader, allows you to download videos from Google, My Space, Yahoo, Youtube, and many many more places. I used it to download many videos from Youtube already without much of a problem/

Recompression

[sakusha]

The one thing that annoys me terribly about these video sites is that they recompress video files available on other websites and present them in a low-bandwith Flash format. Sure Flash is crossplatform Mac/Win and runs almost everywhere, but it has the worst quality of any video codec. And recompressing video introduces significant artifacting.
I've seen dozens of recompressed videos on sites like iFilm and YouTube that are easily available in high quality on the original websites, it's like iFilm and YouTube are scraping the web looking for content to populate their sites. And of course they don't provide a link to the original site, so you have no way to know there's a better quality version available. This is dragging video down to the lowest common denominator. I run a video blog website, and I use non-downloadable streaming video precisely because I don't want some other site scraping my content and recompressing it to make it look like crap.

file size / compressopmg

[krunk4ever]

Maybe not as big as a factor anymore, but filesize is and no compression are the 2 features I look for. Ability to edit online is fine and dandy, but I can already recompress, re-encode, and edit on my machine already. What I need is a service which will not decrease the quality after my upload to conserve bandwidth and allow a good max size, now that video quality is up to the HDTV era.

Google Video I believe doesn't have a max file size limit, but they do recompress your video to whatever codec they use.
Youtube (not sure about file size limit), but after re-enconding into FLV, the quality is pretty depressing.

I haven't tried the others listed on the site, but I currently use PutFile ( http://www.putfile.com/ [putfile.com] ). They have a limit of 25MB for videos and no longer allows direct downoading, but they're decent and actually play back the original file. For larger files, most people probably won't want to view it in the browser anyway, so I upload to RapidShare ( http://www.rapidshare.de/ [rapidshare.de] ) which allows a maximum of 100MB and unlimited downloads. Though for anyone that's used RapidShare, you know about the wait times.

Re:YouTube will eventually die.

[prockcore]

Too bad that YouTube doesn't have a revenue model yet.

They do. It's just not online. All those weekly clip shows on E and VH1 pay YouTube for content.

Limited Availability

[earthstar]

Looks like you guys didnt know that Google Video is not available in many parts of the world.

Here in India,Google Video simply gives a error Message- " Thanks for your interest,This service is unavailable for your region".

OTOH,Youtube works fine.

Re:Good pick.

[stunt_penguin]

It's up to the developers to decide to put a volume slider in. Flash has had that abilitiy since version 1.0.