As I discussed in a previous post (My Digital Content Workflow), I often make short home movies. Typically I share them with my immediate friends and family by posting them to Dropbox and sending the download links via email. Recently I decided to explore other options for video hosting because (1) I am running out of storage space on Dropbox and (2) when playing videos from Dropbox through a web browser, there is a noticeable degradation in quality even with sufficiently fast internet connection speeds (53.8 Mbps download according to Speedtest.net). This led me to explore 2 other juggernauts in the video hosting business: Vimeo and YouTube.
Cost. A Basic Vimeo account is free, although users are limited to 500 MB per week of storage space, 1 HD video upload per week, and a daily limit of 10 video uploads. Vimeo Plus and Vimeo Pro accounts increases those limits. On the other hand, all YouTube accounts are free, with the only constraint being a 15-minute time limit on videos, and that limit can be removed if users undergo a simple account verification process (e.g., sending an authentication code to your phone via voice or text). YouTube 1, Vimeo 0.
Quality. On playback, both Vimeo and YouTube appear to deliver crisp and clean video quality as I would have expected for the resolutions in which the videos were played. While Vimeo allows you to view the video at the standard size or full screen, YouTube has those options plus a midsized "Theater mode" resolution. However, YouTube may from time to time embed advertisements into your videos--I have not yet seen this happen to any of my videos, but they clearly state in their policies that it is a possibility. I'd say playback quality is not significantly different between Vimeo and YouTube, so the score remains YouTube 1, Vimeo 0.
Quirks. As previously mentioned, the Vimeo Basic account imposes a curious limit of 1 HD video upload per week. While there may be times when I'd want to upload more than 1 HD video in a given week, I couldn't justify upgrading to the Plus or Pro versions just to increase that limit. YouTube, on the other hand, appears to employ an interesting song recognition algorithm to identify possible music copyright violations, and this has generated some false positive copyright violations. For example, 2 videos that I uploaded were automatically tagged as having possible copyright violations. One video was from a year end preschool recital where the children were singing "Up, Up, Up" by Susan Reed, and the other video was from a dance recital where the kids were performing to "Let It Go" by Idina Menzel from the Disney movie Frozen (I know, what a novel idea). Actually I was quite impressed that YouTube correctly identified these songs in my home movies given that there was background noise in each video. But then again, I think Shazam performs equally well in the presence of background noise so maybe I shouldn't have been so impressed.
Verdict. For the time being, I have chosen to upload my home movies to YouTube because the price is right and I am not currently constrained by any upload limits as far as I can tell. I am curious to find out what will happen to the videos that have been tagged for possible copyright violations. Will Susan Reed or Disney come after me and make me take down my videos? Time will tell.
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