How to upload video
January 30th, 2008 | robots + kittens
Spent the afternoon dealing with this. Argh.
I had to upload the preview video for our book to a bunch of sites today. I had a huge list, but most of them are for boys, and nowhere in our video does anyone get kicked in the nuts.
Vimeo is where I originally uploaded the video. I love this site. Simple, effective and high quality. You’ll notice that most people wanting high quality go here (at least I notice that). You can reupload a video in case you need to make a change, plus set a custom thumbnail for your video.
Youtube is easy and probably the 2nd best overall experience. Of course, I already had an account there, so that’s maybe an unfair comparsion. But then again, it’s been years since Web site registration was invented. You’d think it’d be a slam-dunk by now. No reuploading or custom thumbnails on Youtube.
MSN Video. Oh. My. God. Probably the poster child for how NOT to use Ajax. Reload the page and you’re magically transported back to the homepage. And the signup? Seriously, they told me to print out documents and sign them. WTF?! Plus, the site looks like a bunch of lawyers took another lawyer who they didn’t like so much out to the parking garage, beat him to a pulp, and then smeared him all over a web page. It says a lot when teenagers’ MySpace pages look better than a Microsoft site. Lacks anything but basic text editing features. Pretty lackluster effort, IMO.
Yahoo Video. Oh Yahoo, I want to love you, but you’re just so damn boring. Perfectly functional experience here, but no context communicated through the design at all. I think it’s a perfect explanation of why the company is in the shitter. Who would want to hang out there? Also, the video conversion is taking forever. Ah, just got a look at it, and it looks like crap. Way to go, Yahoo. You make my video suck.
MySpace Video. Once I got through registration, it was pretty straightforward. Only basic editing features, but their player looks pretty good.
AOL Video. Man, it only took like 10 tries to get through the signup process. And then I had to download a VideoEgg widget, which would be fine if I were an expert user, but I’m not. Just give me a simple file upload and leave me be.
Also put the video onto Facebook, but it’s impossible to find. I think Facebook might just bury itself under its own weight.