Best embedded video solution?

March 6, 2009 10:28 AM

What's are some good solutions for free or cheap website-embedded video serving?

Want better quality than YouTube, no ads, and the ability to track views (and ideally, pauses/abandonment, etc.).

Looking at Vimeo, but not sure that the tracking is adequate.

We're talking about a series of videos, each lasting about five minutes.

posted by bingo to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

if you're not looking at massive traffic, your best option is probably to host the videos yourself and find or build a video player in flash.

you can either use a php (or similar) script to serve the files and report usage, or sift through the logs.

this way, at least you have complete control over branding and terms-of-use.
posted by klanawa at 10:41 AM on March 6, 2009

I'm very interested in this also, an additional concern of mine is image compression parameterization, which Vimeo doesn't seem to provide.
posted by doteatop at 10:58 AM on March 6, 2009

Divshare has decent media hosting with some stats. Or you could do it yourself -- encode into FLV, I find Super© to be pretty good for this task, and JW Player for the flash front-end.

If you're into commercial distribution I've heard good things about Ooyala.

YouTube does now provide high-quality links if your source video is high quality, with a "view in high quality" link. When embedding you can specify high quality by adding parameters to the URL... see here.
posted by greensweater at 11:46 AM on March 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: This is for a commercial situation, with (hopefully) a lot of pageviews. Hosting it myself is what I'm trying to avoid.
posted by bingo at 1:38 PM on March 6, 2009

Best answer: You can use Amazon's S3 service if you're expecting a lot of page views, it's arguably as cheap as you'll get.
posted by Brian Puccio at 4:19 PM on March 6, 2009