Hola Fellas, so I have been debating on how to encode my demos for web. As it is looking now, it seems like everyone and their mother uses Vimeo for their demo needs. Personally I am Quicktime guy. I love the H.264 codec, but I have not played around with it on Web demo work. Anybody out there NOT using Vimeo and encoding and delivering to web on Quicktime? Thanks again you guys.

I am NOT using Vimeo or Youtube or anything else.

IMO the best thing is to use your own regular web server, any plain vanilla free (or spiced up not free) Flash player and encode your video to MPEG4/H.264 with a decent encoder like Handbrake. Nothing beats this combination for quality at this time.

Using Vimeo or other providers, you give up on full control, they do whatever they want with your content. I would not be surprised if one day they would simply say adios amigos and close these sites down. What will you do when you will have to replace all your content in a few days just to keep your professional image clean?

Even though it seems like everyone uses Vimeo for that, it's a violation of their TOS. Vimeo is a community of filmmakers. Not a place to offload your video hosting costs.

I like hosting my own videos encoded using Adobe's implementation of H.264 in Flash. I use Adobe's new freeware flash video player (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaplayback/). So far it has been working great.

The T&Cs for Vimeo forbid commercial use but not demo use. As noted it's meant to be a community of film makers not a video hosting service. The T&Cs seem to be widely ignored but as long as the video streaming use is not going to be a heavy load on their servers then I don't think that there is a problem. If they stopped this use of their $59.95 Plus service then they would probably lose most of their revenue. You are limited to uploading 5GB of video per week. They have a very nice embeddable video player that handles HTML5 & Flash so that the videos are can be viewed on the iPhone/iPad/iPod as well as regular web browsers like we use here www.videobyalice.com

There are a whole variety of video hosting services but I would avoid any free service if you are concerned about long term viability e.g. MotionBox recently went out of business. The high end services like BrightCove are very expensive but supply service to large corporations with bandwidth requirements that would be orders of magnitude larger than any of us would need.

The weirdly named Bits On The Run is a commercial hosting service from the developers of JW Flash Player & are reasonably priced on a sort of PPV basis. Video transcoding, management and streaming - Bits on the Run (http://www.bitsontherun.com/)

For hosting clients videos we mostly use SmugMug Photo Sharing. Your Photos Look Better Here. (http://www.smugmug.com) who have been providing a hosting service for professional photographers for a number of years. They moved into video hosting a couple of years ago & were the first service to deliver 1080p. As a totally paid-for service their business model looks sound & it is perfectly legitimate to use their service for commercial purposes. Previously you needed the their $149.95/year Professional service for the full video service but now it is available to $59.95/year Power users. You get unlimited storage & unlimited bandwidth & can upload 1080p video up to 2GB in size & 10 minutes in length. Here is a site where we are using SmugMug Le Savannah (http://www.propertyvideofrance.com/le-savannah)

Hosting your videos on your own site is really the best way to go. You have control and retain your rights. It can even be cost competitive with the chargeable Vimeo account.

Get a free Wordpress template and use the free Flash players that are out there. They work quite well.

I'll also echo the kudos to Adobe for h.264 in Flash. I think it works better than .mp4.

The point about using Vimeo, SmugMug, YouTube or any other video hosting service is that they can deliver a better service than you can from your own server. Unless that is you are prepared to host you video in the Amazon cloud & always be able to offer a locally cached copy to a viewer. Small low bandwidth videos are OK on your own server but for any decent HD resolution then use a hosting service.

When we say "our own server" I believe we all refer to our hosting service provider (Godaddy in my case) and not a server running in my home office. Decent service providers offer plenty of bandwidth, no need to pay for another service.

One of the positive reasons to have it on Vimeo is to have that external database for views to like the videos and share them beyond your website. It has been a great help for me to connect with other contacts.

Don't just close the side and back doors for access to your reel.

In the case of YouTube, they provide not only a hosting service, but access to a certain market segment. Vimeo to a slightly different segment.

Some of our client work is there, for that reason.

In Vimeo Plus, we get more predictable results and password protection for client reviews, and I don't have to write/adapt html code to get it. This was outstanding when we recently had 90+ short clips to post for internal review - used Vimeo's somewhat buggy bulk uploader, there was some brute force involved, but far superior to writing individual pages & players. Perhaps I could have adapted a flash player jukebox, but this was easier & faster.

Then we also post video on our own and clients' web servers, to control branding & image.

All these distributions have their uses...

The Vimeo stats engine is also excellent, giving you much more than what you would get off your own server.

Andrew

The player from both Vimeo & SmugMug is provided with the service & superior to JW Flash Player that seems to be used on 90% of other sites.

Video just plays better & more smoothly when streamed off Vimeo or SmugMug than when hosted on a general purpose shared web server with GoDaddy. $60/year is not much to pay to present your video in the best possible way.

I've been looking for video hosting solutions where I get the most info about who is watching my videos, and if they are watching the entire video.

I'm looking at Vimeo Plus for this - to code my own page with a video player would be difficult, and I'd probably have to pay someone to do it.

It sounds like Vimeo Plus is the best video hosting site out there for this purpose.

Any other suggestions for getting viewer stats from a video hosting site?

I would stay away from QT because it's given me nothing but problems. Vimeo is good but nothing compares to getting your own web space and player and then encoding to your heart's content so people can see your footage the way you want them to see it.

For the sake of argument, never mind if the video is displayed in exactly the bitrate it was meant for.

I'm interested in gathering info about the viewer - are they viewing the whole video, or clicking off after a few seconds?

If I was using vimeo, I'd probably embed the video on a website. I'm thinking the best way to get the most demographic info is to try and get people to fill out a registration form - they get updates or something, and put info about age, city they live in etc.

I'm thinking of putting a set of related videos up, and I want to see if some are being watched the whole way through or not. I'm thinking people might click on all of them for at least a second while they are on the site. I want to know if they stop watching one after a second, and watch another one the whole way through.

I'm thinking the best way to get the most demographic info is to try and get people to fill out a registration form - they get updates or something, and put info about age, city they live in etc.
Good luck with that - most people (me included) click away at the first sign indicating that their personal information is being gathered.

Good luck with that - most people (me included) click away at the first sign indicating that their personal information is being gathered.

I'll have to second Ervin on this one.... there are way too many sites out there who want to make you "pay" for "free" stuff with your personal info which of course many if not most will turn around and sell to spammers and mailing lists, etc...

Even having to "register" is enough for me to think of something as "too much of a PITA" and move on.

Mind you, bugmenot.com is a very handy thing for those times when I care enough.

Andrew

Try hosting your site with a hosting company that does this kind of work for you.

Good hosts will gather info like: what part of the world (country) your visitor is from, how much time did he spend on your site, exactly which pages he clicked on, the amount of data downloaded, operating system, browser and media player version installed on your visitor's computer, screen resolution, etc... mostly technical stuff.

Computing the number of visitors, time spent on the page, and the size of your video will give you an idea of how many people might have watched it and head to tail and how many just opened it and then clicked away.

Gathering demographic info means fishing for personal information, and that's illegal - except, of course, if somehow you can get your visitors to give that to you free willing.

I run a web host / server myself and I can tell you that you won't get any truly useful stats without paying extra for the seriously analytical server software. That said, Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) always bucks the trend, though at a cost of their javascript link back to their stats server sometimes slowing your site down.

But it still won't tell you who actually clicked on your video and whether they finished watching or not.

For $60/year Vimeo is going to be your best bang for buck, and with minimal effort to set up and implement.

Mess around with the other "cheaper" methods if you want, but remember to consider the cost of how much of your time this is going to take ... and even then you might not be satisfied.

Andrew

Yes, it seems Vimeo is the best bet. Thanks.

No, guys, I'm not planning on doing anything illegal. I would only try to ask people for that information, and obviously very few people would do that. I would never make it mandatory to register to watch the content. I'd put it off to the side, and give something extra if you register, but not require it at all.

Demographic info on the viewer would obviously be useful, but hard to get. Right now I'm just looking for the provider that will get the most info on who is watching, and if they are watching the whole video.

I'm thinking the best way to get the most demographic info is to try and get people to fill out a registration form - they get updates or something, and put info about age, city they live in etc.

No, that is the best way to make people run away very quickly. And even if someone fills the form out, chances are he will just do it to get access to the video(s) and will fill out some completely made up "facts".

Personally, if I wanted to see your videos so badly that I would be willing to go through the form filling, I would create a new email address just to get access and I would code the email address to know it was the one I gave your specific site. The moment you sent me your "updates", I would invalidate that address.

I wish I had been doing that from the day I got on the Internet. Sadly, I was using one address, the same one my family and friends know, and my mailbox is flooded with loan offers, business "proposals", Nigerian scam, etc, every single day. Of course, I forward each and every one of those to spamcop, but that does not stop them from coming. I get hundreds of spam messages for every real message. And I am sick and tired of it, and so is anyone who has been on the Internet for a while.

A web site (which is just an anonymous machine to most of us) asking for personal information raises too many antennae, which means no real info is given (naturally, fora like this one are an exception, since I actually want to be here, and so do the rest of us here).

So, what you are proposing would scare away the people you want to attract most, and would give you fake and worthless demographics from the rest of the visitors.

As for statistics, the typical web server (such as Apache) will log the names and times of resources requested. But it will not tell you whether people finished downloading a huge file. And even if it did, it still cannot tell you whether people watched the whole thing. That is because online video files download faster than they play, so if someone starts watching and quits a minute later, either the entire file or at least a lot more than a minute's worth of it has been downloaded. And the web server has no way of knowing how much of it was actually watched.

Most companies have shied away from asking for demographic info simply because it scares away customers in practice.

The only thing that is worth asking for is an email address and a first name. You can include a check-box if you wish to be extra nice so the users can opt out of any updates. But since they are still 'opting in' technically, you can send them a personal message when you really need it. Make sure you mention this.

You can track location and certain demographic info from google analytics. Start from here and see how this works, then 'rinse and repeat' - that's how marketing works.

And for the record, whenever an Australian is asked for (and has to type in) their 5 digit zip code, we will inevitably type "90210". It's the only one we know.

Andrew

So have people found google analytics the best source of info?

I did Vimeo Plus, and found most of my viewers are in the United States. Good to know, but more specific info would be good. Being watched in Portland Oregon is different (to me) from being watched in Portland Maine.

I'll check out Google Video myself, but how flexible is it? Can you embed the video in another website, the way you do with Vimeo and Youtube.

BTW, doesn't the site you are reading right now ask for some demographic information? Maybe some of you Australians are not really Australian?

To the best of my knowledge, Google Video has effectively been merged with YouTube. My guess is that you will find that new videos are being added to the YouTube infrastructure which (in the end) Google found to be better than theirs.

Andrew

sorry - duplicate post

I just uploaded my first video to Vimeo a few days ago. It played smoothly for me, but others have told me it stutters (no buffering - just doesn't play smoothly). Same for me - some Vimeo videos play smooth as silk, others are a major pain to watch. I've put a thread on this forum and elsewhere, and no one seems to know how to make Vimeo movies always play smoothly. Here's a video that I put on Vimeo last night - in case you want to see for yourself:

(2c) Physics and Kriya Yoga on Vimeo

On the other hand, that same video on my GoDaddy-hosted site (Physics: The quantum explanation" (http://www.torealize.net/2physics.html)) play smoothly for most folks in the U.S.. but for some overseas locations the web links are so slow that playing is totally out of the question - even for those who have very fast web connections in those countries.

So it depends upon your intentions. If you want a lot of viewers, YouTube probably is best. I first posted there less than a month ago and have had over 600 hits - not viral, certainly, but more than I had expected; and more than for my own GoDaddy site.

If you want to post long videos or videos that can be seen in many countries or that you can password-protect, Vimeo is best. Vimeo also can get a surprising number of hits if you join Groups or Channels (even the video that I posted last night has had 2 view).

If you want the best local playback experience, JW Player or other good x.264 player set up to play Handbrake-encoded .MP4s on your local server almost certainly will give the best image quality/ stutter-free experience for most viewers.