Put video on your website with YouTube

The Pros & Cons

On my page about choosing the best video format I recommended that you use Flash, because it's more compatible than anything else, and the filesize isn't too big. I explained that to get your video into Flash format, you have two choices: use an online service like YouTube or Google Video, or run standalone software on your computer like Riva FLV Encoder (Windows) or Visual Hub (Mac). The advantages of using an online service are that it's easy, they host the video for you, and your video will have a wider audience. The advantage of using standalone software are that you can pick which video player you want to use (more control), and you won't have to have links in the video player that can take visitors away from your site. If you're using YouTube, then people can easily click off your video from your site and on over to YouTube's site, which is what YouTube wants, which is why they're willing to help you get that video onto your site in the first place. You get free video for your visitors, and YouTube gets free advertising.

Since YouTube is the most popular online service, I have this special page about it. A big advantage of using YouTube vs. a competing site is that YouTube is incredibly popular, so it can give your video a large audience. The downside is that YouTube videos look like crap. They use the most drastic compression of any web-based video service. That's the tradeoff with YouTube: get a wider distribution in exchange for lower video quality. You can get better quality with services like Google Video or Vimeo (or by using standalone software and publishing yourself), but probably fewer people will see the finished product.

Anyway, this article as about YouTube, so that's what I'm going to cover. But the concepts are the same as with the other online video services: You upload your video to them, and they convert it and host it, showing it on their site, and letting you embed it into your own site.

Here's how going the YouTube route works:

• You register for a free account. (Non-registered users can watch videos but not upload them.)
• You upload your video to them via their website (in just about any format -- .wmv, .avi, .mov, .mpg).
• They'll convert the file and give you the code to put on your website.
• You put the code on your site and ta-da! -- your visitors can now see the video.

YouTube is actually hosting the video; the code on your page just calls on YouTube's server to show the player and provide the video to your site users.

If you do go with YouTube, then remember to give YouTube the highest-quality video you can. Don't compress it first, because YouTube is going to compress it, and if you send them a compressed version then it'll just be double-compressed, and look like crap. YouTube recommends MP4, 320x240, 30 frames per second, MP3 audio. YouTube does a have limit of 100Mb though so don't give them a video bigger than that, but 100Mb will get you plenty of quality. Philip Hodgetts has an article on figuring the optimal data rate for a video you want to send to YouTube. The DV Show says, "I've found the sweet spot to be an encoding bitrate of about 600 Kbps. Anything above that seemed to be wasted disk space, and below 550 Kbps I started to notice degradation."

However, no matter how good the video you send them is, YouTube is going to apply some pretty heavy compression to it, so it won't look as good as what you could do yourself with a different Flash player, because you can choose less drastic compression if you like. Another problem with quality is that YouTube's format is 320x240, but their video player is a little larger, so that stretches the video and makes it look a little worse. Finally, Jim Thompson has an article on why some YouTube videos look better than others. (Two reasons: The worst-looking videos were probably bad to begin with. Remember, you need to give YouTube the highest-quality version it will accept. Second, videos with lots of detail and lots of movement are gonna look worse after compression.)

Incidentally, YouTube's video specs are 25 frames per second and their maximum data rate is 300kbps.

If you want better quality than what YouTube provides, see my article which lists alternatives to YouTube.

My other web video articles

Web video file formats. Exactly what you'd expect: All the different formats explained and compared.

Choose Flash. Explains why Flash is the best video format for your website, and your various choices for getting your video into Flash format.