After evaluating the two leading viable Stage6 competitors, Veoh and Vimeo, I have decided to post the high-quality versions of our videos at Vimeo, despite Stage6’s endorsement of Veoh.

Both Vimeo and Veoh re-encode uploads (something that degrades the quality significantly). Veoh has slightly better picture quality, but reduces the framerate to a stuttering, jerky mess. Vimeo has slightly worse picture quality, but maintains a smooth framerate.

Veoh for some reason collapses the audio into mono, but Vimeo preserves stereo sound.

Vimeo, however, is the clear winner because they provide a link to download the original AVI file that I upload. While Stage6 was still better in the sense that they streamed the original AVI file to the viewer, Vimeo is an acceptable alternative.

Here’s an example of an embedded Vimeo video:

TEAM ROOMBA PRESENTS: Meet the Pyro from FLOOR MASTER on Vimeo.

Again, note that you can go to the video’s page on Vimeo and download the higher-quality AVI file directly (the link is at the bottom-right).

One thing that annoys me about Vimeo’s streaming video is that they seem to set their keyframes to every 12 seconds, which becomes a hassle if you want to skip around to specific parts of a video that don’t fall on those 12-second boundaries.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 6:59 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.