Xiaoniu 小妞

If you haven’t noticed yet I’ve started converting all the videos I have posted from AVI format to FlashVideo (courtesy of VideoEgg). Actually they’re all hosted on VideoEgg too.

I noticed a significant increase in my site’s bandwidth usage once I started posting large videos. Not to mention downloading them takes quite a while. So, to keep my site from getting over loaded and to improve playback speed everything is moved.

Believe it or not there are over 5 dozen sites that offer video hosting. I spent some time checking them out and trying quite a few. I was looking for a site that didn’t include “community features” since I think it ruins the experience, and I needed some place that would accept videos of the size I expect to post.

Vimeo was a good candidate, which I almost went with. It has a very simple interface that is very Web-2.0-ish, adds very little clutter to uploaded videos and videos are downloadable in their original format. The downside is that they impose a 30MB per week upload limit. I have at least one video that is over 30MB, which means it can’t be posted.

 Youtube is also good, but I’m still not sure what is going to happen now that Google has taken them over. Not to mention since they are so large and popular they are a good candidate for advertising. I’m not ready to litter my videos with ads.

I even took a look at DailyMotion. Their file upload limit is 150MB per file. Not bad. The only thing I can complain about them is that your personal page gets cluttered with lots of community crap, which I’m not interested in using.

So, I ended up going with VideoEgg. They are small, but a nice service. No ads yet. Very little crap on your personal page. The upload limit is specified as 5 minutes per video, not in file size. That may sound odd, but I’ll explain why.

They require you to download and install software used to upload videos. This software appears to convert videos on your machine before uploading to the VideoEgg server. That may sound odd at first, but it is a good advantage over other sites.

First, they can offload video processing to your machine, keeping theirs free (think distributed computing). Second, when posting large videos you are only uploading the converted version. You don’t upload a 50MB file just so that they can convert it to 10MB. You only upload the 10MB version. This means faster uploads. This also means that they know how big your video will be (units/minute) before it’s uploaded and can impose a 5 minute limit.

If you read the terms of the service they leave themselves open to introducing some form of advertisement. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they don’t. One thing I have in my favor is that if I chose to change to a new provider, there is certainly no lack of choices.

So, keep your eyes out on the video gallery. I’ll keep converting and updating the gallery with the new versions of the videos. I’m also uploading other videos that I have, but haven’t uploaded since I’m low on disk space.

And one more thing. This is also in preparation for our baby’s arrival. I plan to take plenty of pictures and video. I want to ensure I have plenty of space to post them all.