Video sharing quality compared

by Jordan Running Nov 27th 2006

YouTube is the de facto standard for video sharing on the web, but there are a lot of other options out there. But other features aside, which one offers the best video quality? While Life Goggles doesn't actually answer that question for you, it does gives you side-by-side comparisons of eight major video sharing sites' embedded players so you can judge for yourself. I've been squinting at them for five minutes and can't decide on a clear winner myself, but I will say that Vimeo's scrubber (i.e. seek bar) is by far the best. If you want to put your videos online and quality is an issue, you should definitely check it out. Life Goggles also has a couple handy guides on putting your videos online.

Tags: blip.tv, comparison, google video, GoogleVideo, metacafe, myheavy, revver, soapbox, video, video sharing, VideoSharing, vimeo, youtube

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

MySchizoBuddy said 9:15PM on 11-27-2006

he should have picked a better video with good color variation or fast motion to really tell the difference. plus he got the sizes of youtube and google video wrong. google video is smaller resolution than youtube. but in his comparison its the opposite

Mysterius said 9:31PM on 11-27-2006

I think Blip.tv has better absolute resolution, but its video is sort of choppy. Revver has more or less the same quality, and their video is smoother, too. Nothing really special about Soapbox's, MetaCafe's, MyHeavy's, and Vimeo's videos. Google Video's quality is only OK, but its loading speed is quite good. YouTube's quality is relatively poor, while loading speed is only OK, but I suppose the value in YouTube is the breadth of content and community. Hopefully Google can make some upgrades to YouTube's infrastructure.

As for Vimeo's interface... I think your remarks favor aesthetics over usability. The fading controls are nice and all, but it doesn't let me see what the video is, how far along I'm on it, etc. Basically, it looks pretty, but its interface could be better.

Tim Dorr said 1:19AM on 11-28-2006

Just so people know, Flash only supports two codecs. I'm pretty sure everyone's using VP6, as it's significantly better. But none of these sites can have a difference, other than using better encoders or higher bitrates. The actual code that determines what you see on the screen based on the data is exactly the same.

ToddZ said 4:33PM on 11-28-2006

Thank for clearing that up Tim, I suspected something like that was true. I've seen some good quality videos and some crappy ones on various services, and I figured that for the most part "Flash video is Flash video."

I feel better now knowing that I can blame the uploader for their shoddy-looking video, and not seethe at the service hosting it.

Doug said 6:12PM on 11-28-2006

I have a few videos that I'd like to post on one of these sites. However, because I think they all use "flash", people can freely download them. -- Is there any way for me to upload and stream my videos, and not allow people to download them .... isn't this how NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. streams TV shows? Thanks.

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