Jefferson Graham
USA Today
Videos, including those in high-def, look good in SmugMug. But there are size and time limits.
Veoh has no time or file-size limits, but videos are displayed on a Web page with lots of ads.
Veoh has no time or file-size limits, but videos are displayed on a Web page with lots of ads.
Blip TV’s display is uncluttered, without lots of ads. Users can download video from the site.
Videos on YouTube, the world’s No. 1 video-sharing site, often are fuzzy. The same goes for other popular sites, including Yahoo Video, AOL Video or MySpaceTV.
The culprit is a kind of Catch-22 for online video: To make sure the videos start playing immediately, image resolution is greatly lowered — which results in poor quality.
However, a number of video sites now offer higher-resolution video sharing with slightly longer load times. The difference, while not striking, is certainly better and worth checking out. I tested videos on image-sharing services Veoh, Blip.TV, Vimeo and SmugMug, where the videos all look brighter and clearer than on YouTube. How they stack up:
Veoh: Looks great, but lots of ads With investors including Time Warner, former Disney chief Michael Eisner and former Viacom CEO Tom Freston, Veoh positions itself as a next-generation TV alternative. It offers independent video productions, user-generated content and complete shows from such providers as CBS.
While the content is impressive, the quality of Veoh\’s display and its rules for video sharing are what caught my eye. Unlike YouTube, Yahoo, AOL and others, there are no time or file-size restrictions on your videos.
On Veoh, I uploaded a monster-size 1 gigabyte, six-minute video with ease. More important, it showed off the clip with more clarity, color and sharpness than Vimeo, YouTube, Blip.TV or SmugMug.
And that was before I found out about Veoh Pro, an added feature for Veoh members. The service, available free, will transcode the video in a newer version of Adobe’s Flash software, which is the dominant vehicle for presenting video on the Web.
That’s the good news. The bad: Your video masterpiece is displayed on a Web page littered with ads. To avoid the ads, use the service\’s downloadable VeohTV application. It lets you watch videos in full screen, with no ads. If your original is a large, higher-resolution file, it should look terrific on Veoh TV.
Bottom line: Veoh offers great online quality, liberal upload rules, but noisy display.
SmugMug: Terrific for high-def
SmugMug is best known as a premium photo-sharing service, with annual fees from $59.95 to $149.95. Its pitch is that friends can see your photos on a Web page without advertising. It also provides unlimited photo backup.
Video sharing is part of the mix. But rules are tight. Your video can’t be bigger than 500 megabytes or longer than 2.5 minutes at the $59.95 level, or five minutes for the $149.95 membership.
Imagine the frustration of trying to upload your finished six-minute video only to find out it’s too long. You have to go back to the editing room and chop off a minute.
The good news is that your videos will look terrific on SmugMug.
Instead of showing them in Flash, SmugMug transcodes them to a different file format, H.264, which is what Apple uses to show videos on the iPod and iPhone.
SmugMug is at its best with high-definition video clips. It\’s one of the few sites I know of that shows high-definition videos that look absolutely stunning in their wide-screen glory.
Bottom line: SmugMug is terrific looking, but expensive. Five-minute clip limit is too stringent.
Blip.TV: Download to your desktop
Blip, like Veoh, fashions itself as a TV alternative, with channels devoted to independent video productions you’ve probably never heard of, such as Bikini News and Political Lunch.
And as with Veoh, there are no restrictions on file sizes: I uploaded a 1-GB file. In terms of image quality, however, while it looked better than YouTube, it wasn’t as rich as on Veoh or SmugMug.
I liked the Blip.TV display, which was an uncluttered environment, without tons of ads.
And here’s something you won’t find on YouTube: Blip.TV will let you download the video directly from the site, so you can watch it on your computer at top resolution, the way the videomaker intended it to be seen. (Most sites only stream videos.)
Bottom line: Videos show nicely, and are easy to share across the Web on blogs, websites and places such as Facebook and MySpace. They look better than on YouTube, but not as good as Veoh or SmugMug.
Vimeo: Strict usage rules
This video site has tougher restrictions than the others. You can only upload 500 MB per week — but there’s no time limit on the videos.
That said, the site is bright and cheery, and not cluttered with ads.
Vimeo offers fun tools to show your videos on websites and blogs and Google’s iGoogle personalized home page.
While the site looks cool, the videos are presented in Flash, as on YouTube, and look just a hair better to my eye.
That said, as with SmugMug, Vimeo has a high-definition channel (it’s free), and clips look wonderful. But they’re presented on a busier page, with ads. Be prepared to do a lot of tweaking in your video-editing software to get the HD clips into the proper settings so they can look good online.
Bottom line: Cool, next-generation video-sharing site, with fantastic looking HD clips. Standard-definition video quality is fair, and usage rules are strict.