Late last year, before the launch of what would become DoSu 2.0, I went around and checked out a variety of different streaming video hosts. Youtube, the popular choice, wasn’t cutting it in terms of quality and features. After looking at some cross-comparisons and checking out several personally of those that looked good and had the features I wanted, I came away with the following list. Each had their own advantage that we could use for the site.

• Youtube.com — community; you can drive a lot of traffic by uploading videos to this site. They had some pretty good community features, too.
• Stage6.com — quality; there’s no limit to the specifications of video you could create, it just needed to use the divx or xvid codec. It unfortunately required users to install a not quite mainstream divx web player plugin.
• Vimeo.com — ease-of-use; bar none the simplest site to use and probably the prettiest presentation on the video page itself. It even features an HD stream, but that couldn’t be embedded, unfortunately.
• Blip.tv — features; this video host had pretty much everything I wanted from a video host and more.

Initially I started using a combination of stage6 and blip.tv. I wanted to use stage6 because of the sheer control over the quality of the video, but it was risky to require users to install a plugin to view it. Late into 2007 and early 2008 popularity of stage6 picked up dramatically and this started to become a non-issue. However, out of the blue in late February stage6.com decided to shut down altogether despite being in the top 5 video hosts. They took every video I uploaded with them. Naturally, I removed every embedded stage6 video on this site.

Now, at the same time I was enjoying the variety of features blip.tv offered — customized embedded players including labeling, multi-format streams, automatic blogging, etc. I tried it all. The one problem I had with it was that the frame rate was a tad slow on my computer. So, naturally I was reading their blog to pick up any indication they were working to improve it. Indeed they were! However, I ran across another entry on the SAME day stage6 shut down. In that post they weren’t allowing their users to post any gameplay videos anymore (also dating videos and real estate videos). While this didn’t count machinima, this was discouraging. I decided at this point to move completely over to vimeo.com.

So, from March to mid-July that’s what we used here. The quality was good, the frame rate was good, the embed format was pretty decent as well. However, just recently vimeo announced that they were banning the upload of gameplay videos on their site. It turns out people were uploading whole gaming sessions and rather than limit the length or size of the videos they chose to ban gaming videos altogether. Not only that, but they decided to remove all previous gaming videos! (machinima excluded) So now we have to go through all our vimeo videos and replace them with those from another site. But which?

I thought it was a perfect time to revisit youtube, since it was the only one left on my list. They’ve been talking about introducing higher quality versions of the flash videos for some time now. It turns out it’s been implemented. (though they did it in an odd fashion) They even support widescreen video now, an issue we had during earlier tests. So, that’s where we’re moving. All our embeds will use the high quality stream version from youtube and hopefully it will also drive traffic to this site.

Sokkratez’s Videos | PseudoKnight’s Videos

I want to personally thank vimeo for screwing us up the ass. They’re a great site, but they could have compromised on the issue. Instead it was nothing short of across-the-board gamer discrimination. Some may think that’s a little much, but I stand by the assertion. Now blip.tv, they asked people to not post gameplay videos because they cater to shows. They even mentioned we could change the format of our videos to be a show about video games. Vimeo made no such concession:

“We are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed.”

Their reasoning? It doesn’t involve creative expression. Perhaps one day I’ll write an article about why that’s incorrect, but I’m sure you already know.