As promised in my last post yesterday, I’ve the Deepawali videos online!! Well, putting them online was indeed some story worthy of a mention, so I’ll rant about it first!! 😉
This was the first time that I shot videos & also the first time I was putting them online!! Now those of you who know, I’m on a measly 128kbps cable connection that hardly gives me anything above 100kbps on normal days, more than often going to the lowly 60-65kbps. So ofcourse putting the videos online is a problem!! But then, I decided to brave it, to make available online 9 of the videos that I shot, totalling 42.3MB.
Now there was this problem of bandwidth!! Ofcourse I wasn’t going to host the videos on my website, I simply don’t have the bandwidth nor can afford it for video streaming!! So I had to find a host for videos(possibly free or cheap) like I use Flickr for photos. So then I Googled for “free video hosting“(without the quotes ofcourse) & had somewhere about 49million results. Not knowing anything about it, I decided to have a look at the top result, www.zippyvideos.com. After I browsed through their site, it looked like a good choice, they allow anonymous uploads & you can get a free member-account as well. I went for the free member account, it appealed more to me because:
- anonymous upload limit is 10MB while its 20MB for members
- anonymous users can’t get links for their videos if they loose them, while its all accessible from the member home for members
- members can edit the details(title,description,tags,comments on/off, access permissions) of their videos while anonymous users can’t
- members can delete their videos whenever they want, anonymous users can’t
- members’ videos don’t get deleted ever while anonymous videos get deleted after 3 months of in-activity
and besides all this, you get a seperate page for yourself that lists all your videos for people to see. I think that this dedicated page feature not withstanding, the above mentioned features are alone worth it to signup. But one thing that sucks about this & other such services that I looked up, they have only HTML form based uploads which though OK for small files under 1-2MB for normal users like me having painstakingly slow connections, uploading a file of say 5MB or 10MB is a nightmare!! My connection sometimes fluctuates & gets disconnected, so that means I’ve to re-upload the file again!! 🙁 I had to restart uploading of one 8MB+ file for 3 times & 7 times for a 10MB+ file. Thank goodness that I converted the videos to WMV @ 700kbps, else instead of 42.3MB, the videos would have weighed 108MB in the MOV format!! 😯
Ok, after several hours of toil(its 5am right now), the 9 videos are finally online. 😉 So here they are in the order they were shot!! 😀
— Chai-Paani at Mamaji’s Place, 10.6MB
— Flower Sticks & Rounds, 5.13MB
All these videos are in WMV format encoded as NTSC @ 700kbps. And my user page at ZippyVideos is http://amit.zippyvideos.com/. So far ZippyVideos seem to be quite good, no problems so far except that form upload which every video host seem to be stuck with!! Lets hope that ZippyVideos remain this good(as its now) atleast & doesn’t become evil by decreasing file size limits or by putting any bandwidth limits!! 😉
Which software did you use to you convert these from your camera’s default .MOV to WMV ?
I dunno. I gave the SD Card to my friend who runs a photo studio & he put the videos on conversion overnight. He has some custom software I think.
It’snot difficult at all. Windows Media Encoder is available free of charge from Microsoft, although h.264 is giving me better results these days.
I know its not difficult, heck, its a one-click thing if you don’t want to tweak the output settings!! The point is that whatever encoders that I’d come across for MOV videos weren’t free & I didn’t see a point in spending $30+ on any of them!! So I just gave the videos to my friend & had them converted for free!!
yeah, but its not that widespread!! WMV is quite widespread, not more than MOV but MOV files are bulky!! If it hadn’t been the issue of a widespread format, I’d have probably gone with Theora!! 😉 Btw, any good free convertor for h.264 that you know?
No, I don’t know of free h.264 encoders, but x264 (a derivative) is open source, and thus has several free encoders, but I use h264 when I keep the files to myself. But there’s QuickTIme Pro which uses H264 in case you have the Pro version.