Compressing Video File Size

These two sites have been recommended to me to reduce file size media-convert.com and zamzar.com. Sometimes that's necessary to upload video to some web sites.

Where to Host Your Videos

Put your videos on YouTube. Their systems will take care of the delivery, your visitors may already be familiar with the player and know how to share the videos on YouTube with their friends. It costs you nothing, and may lead to you coming up in the world's second largest search engine.

Support iPhone with YouTube Videos

You should be supporting iPhones with the YouTube videos on your web site. Link to the YouTube video page as a standard link, don't only embed it. iPhones have a YouTube application that will be launched by a link on a web page to the YouTube video page, but iPhones don't yet support flash, so they can't display the embedded videos right on the page in Safari, yet.

Including the link with also help search engine crawlers find the videos and better understand what is on your web site. Here's an example of how to support the iPhone when embedding YouTube Videos.

Broader Social Media, Video and Internet Ideas

I've started a separate blog about Social Media, Video and the Internet on which I'll discuss less specific or tip related things. Dave Tips is about how to, and Guerue is more what can be done and why.

Prep Video for YouTube (and other online video sites)

Almost all video that is ever on your computer is compressed in someway, the way in which it's compressed is the thing that most affects how it looks. YouTube doesn't share the inner workings of how they take what you give them, and make it what they serve.

Using iMovie or MovieMaker's built-in output options can easily create a video that is awkwardly large for uploading, or of too low a quality to look good after YouTube has converted it.

What's the solution?

A google search can make you drown in partial answers, but here's what I suggest if you have a Mac:

1. Tell iMovie to output your reel in Full DV quality. That probably means "sharing" it as quicktime, and choosing the full DV type of file (at least that is how is was on older versions of iMovie).
2. Then, use iSquint (which is free) and choose the default "optimize for ipod" setting. This should output a relatively good quality file of manageable size for uploading.
3. Upload the ipod optimized file to YouTube (or other online video site).