youtube vs. google video
During the recent fall 2005 cyclocross races, Ryan Cousineau of Team Escape Velocity took the opportunity to make a couple of nifty videos, taken using a digital camera then piecing together the clips on his Mac. He cranked them out, turned them into fairly large Quicktime files, and we put them up on the EV website for people to download.
The videos were a hit and quite a few people watched them. But with the brilliant photo sharing website Flickr in the back of my mind, I had to wonder, "Isn't there an easier way to share these things than to get people to download 35mb Quicktime files from our website?"
And so within the last year, it's no coincidence that a number of Flickr-for-video sites have emerged, including the 10,000 lb gorilla in the category Google Video and the scrappy up-start YouTube.com. Both services are free to use (as of writing).
Last night, I took Ryan's cross vids, uploaded them to both services, and the results are displayed below. An interesting test -- can't really see much difference in the quality dept. Ryan claims the audio on YouTube is rougher than Google. Perhaps due to some kind of compression.
YouTube version:
Google Video version:
They both use little Flash 8 players and stream the content. So hosting these 35mb Quicktime's isn't an issue. And it's a nice touch having embedded video content in your page. Google allows you to charge for the content, YouTube does not. YouTube has some nifty social software type features, like tagging content, connecting to friends, comments, etc. Google does not.
YouTube was instant for my upload -- Google Video took a lot longer (12 hrs?) before it was ready to be put on a website. I believe this is due to Google scanning the content for obscenity.
And while the Cross videos were dirty, they did make it up just fine.
All in all, a painless process. The only big issue is waiting for the upload to happen.
If this puts you in the mood for more Cross videos, head over to Google Video and check out the handiwork of Seattle's 15 year old Evan Schmitt, aka "Dirty Moose Productions" who chronicled the Seattle cross season this year.
15 years old. Impressive.
The videos were a hit and quite a few people watched them. But with the brilliant photo sharing website Flickr in the back of my mind, I had to wonder, "Isn't there an easier way to share these things than to get people to download 35mb Quicktime files from our website?"
And so within the last year, it's no coincidence that a number of Flickr-for-video sites have emerged, including the 10,000 lb gorilla in the category Google Video and the scrappy up-start YouTube.com. Both services are free to use (as of writing).
Last night, I took Ryan's cross vids, uploaded them to both services, and the results are displayed below. An interesting test -- can't really see much difference in the quality dept. Ryan claims the audio on YouTube is rougher than Google. Perhaps due to some kind of compression.
YouTube version:
Google Video version:
They both use little Flash 8 players and stream the content. So hosting these 35mb Quicktime's isn't an issue. And it's a nice touch having embedded video content in your page. Google allows you to charge for the content, YouTube does not. YouTube has some nifty social software type features, like tagging content, connecting to friends, comments, etc. Google does not.
YouTube was instant for my upload -- Google Video took a lot longer (12 hrs?) before it was ready to be put on a website. I believe this is due to Google scanning the content for obscenity.
And while the Cross videos were dirty, they did make it up just fine.
All in all, a painless process. The only big issue is waiting for the upload to happen.
If this puts you in the mood for more Cross videos, head over to Google Video and check out the handiwork of Seattle's 15 year old Evan Schmitt, aka "Dirty Moose Productions" who chronicled the Seattle cross season this year.
15 years old. Impressive.
1 Comments:
After saying that about the audio, I took a serious listen to the two videos here, and I can't hear a difference.
The soundtrack is so low-quality anyway that I doubt there's much value in thinking about it.
I'm more concerned about how much I have to learn from a 15-year-old about video production :)
By
Ryan, at 5:45 pm
Post a Comment
<< Home