Video Hosting / Embedding Suggestions?

Illusions

I'm nearly finished with a new portfolio website and was trying to figure out how to show some turntables and animations I had worked on, and initially planned on going with Vimeo, due to them having HD available, source video download-able, and a few other perks. However after reading through their Community Guidelines, and speaking with one of their staff it looks like I'd be walking a fine line on how I'd be hosting them, and don't want to risk having them pulled without warning while trying to find a job.

So I'm wondering if there are any other good video hosts out there with abilities similar to Vimeo, or a simple and easy to use video embedding platform. I'm not too keen on YouTube's controls and hosting, and I'd like to avoid ads popping up in my videos as well, so it looks like Viddler is out since I can't afford its Pro pricing. I was looking into JW Player as well, but wasn't sure how long it would take to get set up and looking good, or how much watermarking/logo embedding or branding they'd have on their free version, or whether I should use the Pro version.

Any help on this matter would be appreciated.

notman

Honestly, the best option I know of is using Vimeo or YouTube, which obviously you already mentioned. The next best option, is to embed it into your site using HTML5, but not every browser is supporting that already. If you do that, make sure you check with several browser types.

Otherwise, just have it as an html link, and let them click on it. It's not as 'nice' as an embedded video, but when the click on it, their client-side video player should start. If not that, then they can download it, and play it (and it allows them to view it again later).

Tom Ellis

I think YouTube would be your safest bet, your vid is unlikely to go down or get pulled (unless for some reason you use copyrighted content in it) and obviously everyone is familiar with it.

Vimeo is ok but I absolutely despise the fact you can't skip beyond the buffer (is that still the case)?

It annoys me to no end, especially on longer videos where you want to show somebody a part later on in a video, or rewatch it yourself, and you can't without buffering the whole thing. If I'm on a slow connection I usually just give up.

I like Notman's suggestion of using the standard file link and letting the client handle the playback or download. I'm not an employer, nor am I employed in the industry but I would've thought at least an option to download your reel might be useful.

Illusions

Thanks for the help guys. I've looked more deeply into JW Player so I can host my own videos and not worry if someone on Vimeo will suddenly decide that they breach their Community Guidelines. The latest version seems to have HTML5 support, as well as a way to interface with YouTube, so that could always be a fallback (or lastly going with Vimeo and hoping for the best). Besides that, the download links to videos in different formats sounds like a good idea and one I will implement.