Topic Title

Anyone out there have any recommendations for a good FREE video hosting site? I have to get that video if my 5-year old riding his bike without training wheels for the first time to his grandparents, stat.

'Preciate it.


joebag

Hello Joe:

Might I sugget buring a CD or DVD and overnighting it? This way they can watch it w/o downloading it, and it might be a quicker way to get it to them?

I appreciate the suggestion Neil. That's how we've been doing it in the past. But we take mini movies with our digi camera all the time, and it would be nice to be able to provide a link for the relatives & friends who visit the kids' blog to be able to see that movie. So I guess what I'm saying is that it won't be one-time thing. I'd like to have the hosting site at my disposal for ongoing use. If I send out CDs to the grandparents, aunts and uncles everytime we shoot somethign worthwhile, we'll go broke!

I've checked out Streamload, and PixParty, but I'd like to get some first-hand recommendations from anyone who has used a free video hosting site.

I'd recommend just getting a domain and webhosting service. I use phpwebhosting and it runs about $9.95 a month and then about $25-30 once a year for the domain registration. They start you off with 200+ megs space, but allow up to unlimited based on your doamin traffic. I've had gig's on there before, but I don't leave it on there for long as I try not to abuse their servers. They have unlimited email addresses for your domain, you can host your own family webpage and such. That's basicly what my domain is. www.joshhuggins.com most of my family members have their own personal unlimited email address. josh@joshhuggins.com, tom@joshhuggins.com What size/quality files are you dealing with? There might be a free service that would work for you, but the free services I tried when frist getting started were just a headache.

Thanks for the reply, Josh. I'm pretty happy with the Picasa/Hello/Blogger setup I have now, especially since it costs me nothing (there's a trend here). Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't allow me to upload and post video. I think the simplest thing would be to find a free service where I could upload my videos (anywhere from 3 to 8 megs each) and provide a link on the Blogger site.

It seems like there are lots of video hosting sites out there, but many seem sketchy to me, like it's just some guy in his basement. Not there's anything wrong with that, but I'd just like to ensure the best and quickest way to see the clips for the end users.

Well best of luck on your search. Remember, the best and quickest is not always avalible for free

I was talking with a friend this weekend who works for a local radio/tv station. He was telling me that Windows MovieMaker is doing an excellent job of editing and compressing movies. A 1hr. movie file in wmv was coming aout about 1/10th the size of a compressed mpg file.

However, when I try to open an mpg file with MovieMaker, my computer says that another application is using the file. I suspect that Roxio is putting a tag on the file that keeps MovieMaker from opening it, so I can't test his claims of compression, but if you can try it, it might give you enough compression to email the file.

Hello:

As an aside (or possibly a workaround), do you folks know about WinZip's ability to split (and then rejoin) large files into workable-sized chunks? It's under Actions/Split (Shift-H) -- you can make the pieces any size that you want/need to.