Suggestions for sharing videos

[smirk]

Hi, we have some family videos that we want to share with friends and family. Does anyone have a recommendation of a video sharing site for hosting it at full (or decent) quality? A pay service is fine.

iCloud photo sharing won't work because some of the videos are longer than 5 minutes. YouTube doesn't like some of them because they contain music in the background, which YouTube says violates copyrights. Flickr limits playback to three minutes or something.

As a related question, when iMovie renders the video, it seems to create multiple versions at different resolutions. What do people generally do when sharing these things? Do you share all the resolutions and let the viewer decide? That seems kind of messy.

Thanks!

 

[Meister]

you could use skydrive for that.
my office 365 plan includes 1 terrabyte of cloud storage

 

[kohlson]

Yeah, if there is copyrighted music in the video then YT will flag it. You may want to use a cloud drive (Box, DropBox, SkyDrive), as suggested. iMovie is creating multiple versions/resolutions because that what it's set to do. You can adjust it to do a single file. Without knowing what video content there is, I recommend either 720p or 1080p. If you're uploading to a site like YT, then upload the highest resolution. But if you are just uploading files that viewers may need to download, then I would probably pick 720.

 

[smirk]

Thank you! One thing I forgot to mention is that some of these videos relate to each other, so it'd be nice if when you watched one of them, the service made it easy to discover other of our videos. YouTube does this, as does Flickr. A file sharing service like DropBox doesn't, unless I'm missing something. So I think I'm hoping to find something more tailored for photos and videos. The ability for viewers to comment would be a nice plus, too.

 

[ColdCase]

Another option, if you want to go there, is to buy a domain name and rent server space at say GoDaddy or better (or host a server of your own). With a simple web page, you could organize the videos however you like. The family uses a browser of their choice. Thats what I do, but then I've been doing this since before youtube or flickr was invented.....

 

[Boyd01]

Have been using Dropbox, but my needs are pretty modest. AFAIK, the only limits are the size of the files and your space allocation (2gb is free).

 

[BeechFlyer]

Have you looked at vimeo?

 

[Dave Braine]

YouTube doesn't like some of them because they contain music in the background, which YouTube says violates copyrights.

It's for that reason that I use Vimeo.

As a related question, when iMovie renders the video, it seems to create multiple versions at different resolutions.

I take it that you are using iMovie11(v9), and you are Finalizing your Projects? If so, there is no need to Finalize a Project as you've seen what that does. It makes those movies available to other applications via the Media Browser. If you don't want that, just use the Export As A Movie or Export to Quicktime options.

 

[smirk]

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate your advice. I started looking into Vimeo to host the videos, with a Wordpress front end, but it started getting too complicated. I really just wanted to quickly throw up a photo & video album, not create a web site or learn Wordpress. Anyway, we ended up going with SmugMug. There are some quirks but overall it's super easy and works well enough.

Thanks again for the help!