I have been using Brightcove Network to host my video works for just over a year. It is actually more complex then any other video sharing sites but gives you more control of how you want to publish flash videos. More importantly, they offer a client encoding application, Brightcove Publishpod, and the compressing quality is not so bad at all.

Unfortunately, they are moving on from free service to paid account. My account has been disabled and the videos will be turned off in the end of January unless I upgrade to Brightcove 3 account. One has to develop and change to a better business model. And they seem to focus more on corporate target. No fuss. I just need to find another host. The hunt is on.

Control and compression quality come first when I choose this service. No one gives you options like Brightcove does, so it comes down to the final flash video they produce up in the cloud. I decide to find out which one is the best for the job.

So Long Cathy is the perfect video for this exercise. I literally made this video frame by frame. It is very tricky to codec this one because of its constant change. In fact, it is the key for me to choose which video sharing web site that I will use to publish my work from.

I am done with YouTube. Although it is the most popular video social media, they have got the worst quality. It comes down to these two sites, Dailymotion and Vimeo. Dailymotion is not as bad as YouTube but is not that good either. On top of that, after signing up, I start to get spam contacts from them.

And the winner is vimeo. Their video compression is very impressing, even better than Brightcove. It preserves the details nicely, especially, on my face that appears only 2-4 frames each time. Nothing can compare to the original and watch it as a video loop on a CRT television but this is the best. Next task is just to upload the videos and embed them to the blog.

So Long Cathy from ApostrophePong on Vimeo.