The answer depends on a number of factors:

1. how much control you want over your video
2. how much bandwidth your server has, and
3. what you want your video player to “look” like…

So let’s drill down into each of these categories…

Why would you want to control your video? There are two reasons why… The first is that if the content is proprietary to you, other people can reference your video on THEIR site, and YOU are paying for the bandwidth. The second is – even worse – people can “steal” (read: save) your video, download it, and then “claim” it as their own.

Not good.

Having a video file (such as a .mov or .mp4) file embedded into your web page is not usually ideal, and is server intensive and usually slow to load as the end user has to wait (often) for the FULL video to download before it starts playing… (yawn).

The other common way for video to show when it’s self hosted is to have the file converted into a .flv file, (which are usually smaller in size), then reference that file using a player such as that found at longtailvideo.com . It’s usually way better to do this compared to the .mov or .mp4 versions, because a) more people will be able to actually SEE your video in their browser (without installing a plugin first), and the video will start playing much faster.

Most websites are on shared servers (with up to 700+ sites housed on the same server) – if one of these sites just happens to get the front page of social bookmarking sites Digg, the traffic could be rather taxing on your site. So if your video is housed on your site – it might just have trouble playing!!! (buffering… buffering… buffering…)

So… Whats the work around?

FREE: One way is to host your video on sites like youtube, metacafe etc – this is great if you want other people to (potentially) see your video, and you can easily embed your video from within youtube, just as others can take your video and put it on their sites…

PAID: You can host your videos on sites like amazon’s S3 servers. This is great, as you pay (very little) for the bandwidth you use, and it’s infinitely scalable. The drawback is that it actually requires a little bit of technical “know how” to organise your account. S3Fox is a cool plugin for firefox that I use, (and is available for free).

One service I use a lot is the paid version of vimeo called vimeo plus – it’s awesome for ten reasons:

1. It’s easy. Easy uploading. Easy interface. Easy embedding.
2. It allows me to prevent others from downloading the source video.
3. It allows me to only show the video on specific sites, so that if people use my source code it won’t work on their site.
4. It allows me to password protect videos (if I want)
5. It allows me to upload 1Gig files.
6. It allows videos longer than 10 minutes.
7. It allows you to embed and play amazingly high quality HD videos.
8. It’s fast to convert once online.
9. It’s fast to play.
10. It’s not run by google.

Oh – and it’s only about $60 a year.

So there you have it.

Not an entirely unbiased review at all

Got a question?

Make a comment below…