SamuraiBlog.com

You may have noticed I’ve been fleshing out this site recently with some of my works. When I got started doing this I thought I would scout out the best video sharing site for professionals or just people who don’t want their videos to look like shit.  So far I’ve tried YouTube, Revver, Veoh, Brightcove and Blip.tv (and that’s where I stopped).

You see, it seems video sharing websites are all out to get ‘cha. They get bumpers at the end of your video, overlays, special buttons and what seems to be the whole 9 yards when it comes to usage rights. The video quality is bad. Your uploads can not exceed 100 MB. They’re allowed to play your video in desecrate desktop applications and server advertising along-side.Whoa! No thanks.

What I’m going to do is just run down the list. Each site has its drawbacks but ultimately sucked, save one.

YouTube

YouTube is the traffic king. Yes, we know that and every other comparison out there puts them at an advantage for that. Well, fuck YouTube. The picture quality of the youtube flash transcodes are absolutely horrible because they use a very low bit rate for the re-encodes. They do this, it seems, so they do not have to drop frames as all other video sites I’ve tried seem to drop frames from the video and create a jerky feeling to smooth animations and forget about pans. YouTube videos also have relatively decent (compared to all but Blip.tv) audio encodes, but they still sound like no more than 64kbps, perhaps less, and still on a mono track.

The video I uploaded to YouTube turned out looking pretty shitty. The words in the titles blend together due to artifacts. The motion is nice as it seems full frame rate was preserved and audio was almost acceptable.

Veoh

Veoh – I don’t have much to say about Veoh. Their video upload process is not a nice single page interface like most other sites, in fact taking 3 pages. Like Revver, they tell you your video is ready to watch somewhat quickly but it usually still takes another 5-10 minutes. The picture quality is decent, and without scaling the videos look pretty clear. Even so, the frame rate is drastically lower than the source video, making the animations jerky. The audio quality was horrible, ditching 2 channels for 1 and using what sounded like like less than 36kbps.

The video I uploaded to Veoh looks decent. It’s way more jerky than the source footage. The titles and their edges are clear. If I had to choose between YouTube and Veoh I’d choose YouTube. Using Veoh would make me feel like a whore. They pretty much get to do whatever they want with your video, including whore it out to other video sites, like MySpace, YouTube and Google Video (primarily).

Brightcove.tv

Originally I picked up Brightcove because I perceived it as having the best video quality. I saw Garry Newman over at garry.tv go through this same process a few months ago. He eventually settled on Brightcove so I thought I’d give it a try. Their video player is really nice. The interface is clean and subtle. Not surprisingly, the video quality is half-way decent, relative to other flash video sites. I would put its video quality on the Veoh side of a comparison between Veoh and YouTube. Despite that-they drop a high number of frames to maintain that quality and the audio is terrible. The interface to their website also kind of sucks after you upload the video. The uploading process is nice, but the so-called “dashboard” is not.

The video I uploaded to Brightcove must be in some sort of limbo right now, possibly being reviewed for copyright infringement or something like Revver does.  Regardless, it turned out decent but with poor audio and low frame rate.

Blip.tv – the winner, surprisingly

After all this uploading and waiting, I finally choose Blip.tv. I did not expect to choose Blip when I started on this journey, well, because of it’s name. It sounds like another bullshit rip off video site (like Veoh, Revver or Metacafe). That said, they have the best interface, best upload process, quick processing, no ads, allow direct downloading, will transcode your video into multiple formats, and as far as I can tell there is no upload limit. Their flash video player is really clean and lightweight, and blends in well in white-background sites AND supports 16×9 videos.

Despite dropping frames, the videos look really good. The transcodes seem miles ahead of all the other video sites. The audio is damn near true to the source footage, with, get this: TWO channels, encoded at what sounds like 96kbps or maybe a little more.

The video I uploaded to Blip.tv seems a little washed out (more so than the source) and is a bit jerky with good audio. You already know the story, I won’t patronize you with the details. Instead I want to show off this feature which I think all the other sites try to do with “channels” and such-but executed horribly. Blip.tv calls them “shows” but none-the-less, its just a group of your videos-executed the right way. Check it out, my “show” on Blip.tv. It gives you a large video area with a small browser and information area-exactly how it should be. There seems to be built in support for serial episodes of whatever you like, and it automatically creates video a video podcast for you. Fucking sweet!