I would feel much better with a DV Info host than any other. Fifty people trying to post to YouTube does not sound that good to me, especially at the last minute. I have enough trouble trying to post to my own website. JMHO.

Mike

The other obvious site would be Video.Google. The encoding can look great and you have the option of embeding it into your own pages. As an example of good encoding, take a look at my site and watch some of my last entry. It plays pretty smooth and I am not hosting the file.

On the bad side of the coin, it requires you to have a fairly up to date version of Flash Player installed via your browser. For most that is effortless and seemless.

Try the links to my videos here:
http://www.DeepBlueEdit.com/Portfolio.htm and watch "Memories of a Dream" first. Then look at "Secrets" to see what a bad encode looks like. Not sure why Secrets came out bad but it did. I may try re-uploading it to them and see if that helps. Not sure that's an option however.

In general it can take from 4 to 48 hours to get loaded on Google. If we are looking to have them hosted after judging, this is a good thing.

Sean McHenry

I'm uncomfortable posting videos I care about on YouTube as you give up all rights (until you take it down) of the video. YouTube can use it however they please. And if you had it up, they use it for something, then you take it down, it's too late - they already used it for whatever they wanted. Granted, I doubt YouTube uses many of the videos uploaded to their site, but still a risk.

Roger that!

Totally a no-go on the You-Tube suggestion for me. The reason is any video uploaded onto You-Tube becomes You-Tube's property, if I remember correctly. You give up all rights. They can use, sell, edit, whatever they want with your video. I think you take your rights back if you take the video off You-Tube, but if it's already been used, then it's too late to change that. I just don't like the idea of not holding onto the rights to my video for the sake of convenience. There are other ways and it seems to work fine.

A big thumbs down to You Tube

my input on the subject
 

From what I see there are 2 main problems with services like youtube:

- not possible to download the movie on the computer (unless some of us know how to check the html source and find our way)
- the quality is many times even below the minimum suggested values here at dvinfo (in those tutorials on how to compress your videos).

I'm not selling these things but I did some research and for ~40$ there is available what is called VPS (Virtual Private Server) with storage around 10gb, and unmetered bandwidth which means that there would be more than enough space (if there would be each short to have 50mb in size, it could fit 200 of entries) and we know most of them don't go beyond 20mb. Also, because of the unmetered situation, the movies can be downloaded as many times as we want without fear for overcharge or so.

Each user would have an account so they could delete their entry if they wanted to but this account would be frozen after the deadline date until the winner announcement to avoid modification :) Or a CMS would be put in place, or any other solution.

I am sure that a few of us here (including myself) would be willing to put up a few dollars a month so the server could be paid for.

Dylan, would you spare a sip for the server tho? :)

If people are interested in showcasing their work just go to a site like godaddy.com and register your name as the domain and they will host webspace for you. That's the company I went with and I've been more than happy. I host my personal webpage there www.kellyharmsworth.com and my company web site www.proflight.ca. Both are under heavy construction at the moment :-)

Cheers
Kelly Harmsworth

There's a plug-in in Firefox that does this. It's called the Amazing Media Browser. There are ways to protect embedded video from programs like this one so it doesn't always work.

Quite often, inexpensive servers with unlimited bandwidth have slow download speeds, which would be a bit of a pain when a hundred people are trying to download 10 videos a day. It's not always the case, but I know a few people with servers like that.

Different things :)
 

There is no such things as unlimited "per se". It is called unmetered; meaning that they open a 2mbps port on the server that allows you to transfer at any time with a speed of about 200k/sec (or your connection can handle that rate or several downloaders would add up and sum the 200k/sec). On the VPS will be only the DVC's movies, which gets announced at a rate of 4-5/day (let's say each 20mb). Takes roughly 2 minutes to download one (assuming you do it at 200k/sec). On average we are talking about 10-15 minutes to download (most of folks out there seems to have an average of 30k/sec download rate). As you probably imagine, not all of us will download the movies at the very same time tho. (the port can also be 10mbps which equals to 1mb actual download rate).

As a conclusion, anything works but to be able to download the movie on the computer seems to be a very important thing (even if someone has slow connection, they can download it and watch it good comparing to being forced to view in a browser); I personally watch them full screen and set myself at a distance.

There are some other minor issues to keep in mind as well. We have been over a few of these some time ago but they bear repeating:

Putting a file on a server that is meant to be a file holding area is not the same as a server meant for serving multimedia. A multimedia server has special software to allow actual streaming of media. The difference being that while most of us these days have pretty quick connections, a file can download about as fast as we can watch it play out. That's not streaming, that's the nature of what Apple used to call "Progressive Downloading". The file is being downloaded to a cache and stored on the viewers computer in their temporary internet folder. If they want a copy, all they have to do is go into that folder, copy out the media file and rename it. Viola, they have a copy of your movie. Take a look at your temporary folder sometime and see what's in there. You might be suprised.

Streaming servers send smaller chunks directly to the player. The chunks are cached to play smoothly but they are not held in cache as a whole media file.

It makes little difference these days with the fast connections but be aware, just because you have found a storage "bucket" that can hold your file, there is no guarantee it will be secure and no guarantee on the throughput speed.

If you use a Windows Media file format and your bitrate is 256Kb per second, the machine you store the file on should have at least that much guaranteed download speed <B>per connection</B>.

Sean