After seeing the performance of my self-hosted video solution, I rethought the wisdom of trying to host myself. First of all, performance from anywhere but home was pretty poor; the stream preload could keep up with the video playback, but only if everything went exactly right. Once a hiccup occurred, it hung up and took an inordinate amount of time to recover.
Also, my upload bandwidth at home is limited. If several people tried to view a video at the same time (I know I flatter myself, but it could happen), performance would really go down the tubes.
So I decided to host through Vimeo. They’re free, support the features I’d like, have a nice player interface, and aren’t obnoxious like YouTube.
With luck, offsite-hosted video should be much more performant for viewers. To test, the Vimeo-hosted Bionicle video is displayed below. I personally think the quality is better, not to mention the performance.
Enjoy!
Bionicle from Matt Wigdahl on Vimeo.
