Consumer Video Sharing Web Site Roundup

For a part-time videographer and self-styled filmmaker I'm remarkably stingy with showing my work. It's not necessarily that I think it's that great, or that I don't want people to see it...it's mostly that I just don't trust social video websites. The convoluted copyright jargon leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, one that I was only able to rinse away by publishing my work on my own site. You, however, have many more options and if you're like my less prissy peers, you may be looking for an alternative to Ye Olde YouTube.

So I went on a mission to try out four of the available social video services and see if there was anything competitive with YouTube. Ease of use is out the door -- any one of these sites is easy enough to upload to. What I want to see is format support, HD support, and quality of playback and conversion. The fact is that while my camera was one of the few that shot in HD when I bought it, anyone can shoot in HD these days and most users are going to want to share their material in the best quality possible. Additionally, there are an absurd number of video codecs available; we want a website that converts from one to the other with as minimal a hit to video quality as possible, and converts as quickly as possible.

Today's contenders are Vimeo, Veoh, Viddler, and Facebook Video.