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Recently when I wanted to upload the home video of a family function, I had a problem in uploading the same in the web for my friends abroad. My old favourite video host "Google Videos" doesn't accept new videos anymore after it took over YouTube. The very famous 'YouTube' is limitting the length of the videos to maximum of 10 minutes. So splitting the video to 10 minute clips doesn't seem intresting because over the period of time, the viewers might lose intrest. So I searched for some more video hosts, who can meet my criteria - support longer videos, larger file sizes and option of downloading the videos for offline viewing. Finally I zeroed on (i) Yahoo Videos, (ii) Vimeo (iii) Veoh. Among these I am pretty impressed on Vimeo and Veoh and this blog is about Veoh majorly.

The problem with Yahoo Videos is that it not only limitted the video size to 150 MB (I had a clip of 165 MB running to 70 minutes), but also the uploading is dead slow and often got reset with the dropping connection. So it was ruled out reluctantly. However the best part of Yahoo Videos is its Playlist feature that can be embedded in any webpages, a feature often used by the movie downloading / sharing sites.

Next I landed in Vimeo, which is a video sharing that hosts original videos. It encourages users to upload the videos they had shot rather than the movie / TV show clips. Here they have both the paid / basic free plans. The free plan allows the user to upload 500 MB worth of files in 1 week If you have uploaded files of 500 MB, then you have to wait for a week (normally calculated from the date of registration) and upload the rest. But the best part of Vimeo is its speed in uploading. Its flash based uploader moves the file faster than the regular web based uploader in many cases. As per Vimeo's recent changed policy, the original file uploaded will be deleted from their server and the encoded version, (FLV format) will be available for download forever. Downloading is also easy - Just click the Download Button at the end of the page, below the statistics. I can use Vimeo for uploading shorter video clips, but for videos of longer duration and good quality, it won't be a viable option. So the next option also ended up in some limitations.

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Finally I stumbled upon "Veoh". It is very much like what the old Google Videos was offering - even a full movie can be uploaded as single file, with no size limitations right now and Veoh Uploader - a seperate application for uploading files more than 1 GB, just like Google Video Uploader. But it differs from the rest in a way that you have to install a Veoh Compass (12MB) - that comprises Veoh Player to view the full movie and download it with an inbuilt Download Manager. It is a worthy download and install because it doesn't launch a seperate media player as such, but plays the full Veoh videos inside the browser itself. Also it manages your downloads in an organised library. Without Veoh Compass, you'll be able to preview only 5 minutes of the Veoh hosted videos. Downloading the videos are also simple. This had got one of the best collection of full length online movies (my search criteria was the old malayalam hits) and best part is that can be downloaded too.

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And... the days of whole world scratching its head about downloading the videos from YouTube is a thing of past. Had someone noticed that YouTube offers the viewers to download the videos in various formats like FLV, 3gp (mobile format), mp4 (iPod and mp4 Players). Look at the details box of the video to find this option.

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Some of my friends asked me a better software for DVD Ripping and media coversion. They can check these following links.

1. Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate - Download - Tutorial
2. Xilisoft AVI - MPEG Convertor Download - Tutorial
3. My Video Convertor - Download



{oshits} readers for this review on Video Hosts.