YouTube may be the best-known mainstream video-hosting site on the Web, but it's certainly not winning any awards for the visual quality of its content. YouTube's creators have said higher-resolution videos are on the way, but until then, there are a handful of other services that do a much better job at making your uploaded video look a little less Webby.
There's another problem at hand: size. Video files are big, and a lot of the most popular services place tedious size restrictions. Those restrictions mean that you are either going to have to compress your video through third-party software before uploading or make smaller, lower-quality source recordings to begin with.
We've handpicked four services that have pretty lenient size limits and that don't force you to download software clients just to graduate up to the higher caps. To be fair, we're also comparing all four to the YouTube status quo.
So here's the deal. We took a source video of just less than 2 minutes at full VGA quality at 30 frames per second. It came off a recent-model Canon digital camera that saved it as an approximately 200MB AVI file. Your results for source material may vary, but based on the popularity charts on Flickr, Canons rule the roost both overall and in the point-and-shoot camera category, so we felt that it was a good control.
It's worth noting that Casio has several models of digital cameras with "YouTube capture" modes, though these are simply recording video in MPEG-4 H.264 at smaller resolutions, which takes up less space. You can accomplish a similar feat, albeit using a different video codec, if your camera has a "compact" or "e-mail ready" video-capturing mode.… Read more
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