I’m working on switching from using a Mac to using Linux for editing video. I have a mini-DV camcorder that a bought a few years back, and I’ve been looking at capture and editing software for Linux.
Along with that, I want to post some videos online for family to be able to see I want to preserve the original quality as much as possible, offer the option to download the video, and be able to share some videos with family only (not the entire Internet).
I’ve been looking at various reviews of video sites (such as this PCWorld one) and decided to look at blip.tv and Vimeo in more detail.
Blip seems to have lots of controls, options, etc. And, they seem to really care about end users, respond fast, and care about freedom. There’s an impressive response from their support team concerning Ogg Theora out there. They offer FTP uploads (which are a huge improvement over HTTP POST uploading, in my opinion, and easily scriptable). They can also automatically post your video to archive.org or about a dozen other video or blogging sites.
But what I want to do is not really what they are aiming at. They are set up for “channels” (you can apparently only have one channel per user), and for more professional users. Most notably, you can’t make videos private or restricted without paying for their $100/year or so “pro” account.
Vimeo looks very much like the Flickr of video. They do offer various options for restricting who can see a video. When they transcode video to Flash, they have the option of preserving it in HD, which blip.tv doesn’t (both go 640×480 or so by default, and blip maximizes out that that). Though both offer the option to download the full, unmodified original. Vimeo has only one option for uploading, and it doesn’t seem to work well with Firefox. They have little detail about anything in their docs. Maybe it’s more the Photobucket of video than the Flickr of video. (Oh, who am I kidding — that’s Youtube).
Of course, there is Youtube. Maxes out at 320×240, doesn’t offer the original for downloading. Doesn’t make me think all that positively about them.
I could also use Flickr. I’m not sure if they offer the original, but there’s a 90-second limit on uploads there.
Any other thoughts?
What are you going to use to capture/edit?
You can have a look at [url=http://www.kinodv.org]kino[/url], if you still don’t know.
I haven’t decided for sure yet. I found a [url=http://lwn.net/Articles/262985/]nice review[/url] of some of them. I’m trying kdenlive right now, but may also wind up using Cinelerra.
You might want to check out [url=”http://viddler.com”]Viddler[/url]. I have some command line tools for the API including an uploader. We are working on FTP upload :)
Do you know how Viddler eliminates referral link spammers?
When HTML5 video comes out, it should be easy to host your own videos.
My video site is here:
http://video.natalian.org/
Is waiting for HTML5 OGG support. There are some experimental builds already available:
http://www.double.co.nz/video_test/
http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-media-support/
I recently was looking at options for my blog, and decided to try out blip.tv. Indeed their system appears to cater towards making their job of selling ads easier; their desired content is episodic content so they can sell an advertiser on multiple videos, and forecast viewership in the future. Interestingly, they have given buy out rates for people to sell their own ads: 500 dollars and $5 CPM. I don’t buy or sell ads for online videos, but I wonder whether that falls into “pricing competitors off our site”, “buying access to video’s sponsors for service and a song”, or likely somewhere in between.
The cross posting function disturbingly asks to store a password. Granted, blogs are such shitty technology that most can’t afford such a concept. But it’d be nice if they at least suggested a separate, revocable account on systems that allowed it.
But I do appreciate free services, since it’s hard for me to predict what will be popular beyond what I can afford. That’s the fear with self hosting. While I ran my own site I had several problems — referral link spammers hammering the site, xmlrpc vulns etc. It’s never good when your roommate (the guy hosting you) tells you the site’s taking too much bandwidth, and you haven’t uploaded any pictures or videos, its just referral spam =(
ANy thoughts? Yeah. Why?
As a Free Software user who does not use Flash, I would ask only one question: which sites allow you, without Flash installed, to download the video in a supported way?