Youtube vs. Dailymotion: Video Comparison

Let’s say you received a new camcorder for Christmas. Maybe you got a Flip Mino, maybe you got an Aiptek Action HD like me, or maybe you even received a high end consumer model like a Canon Vixia HF-100. Regardless, you’ve been shooting footage with your new toy and you’re itching to post some of your work. It’s a simple choice to upload video, but once you’ve made that decision, what service do you use? Should you go with YouTube, the everyman’s video site? Or do you use a Dailymotion, which obviously has a smaller audience, as compared to the crowd favorite YouTube? Do you go with any number of other sites and services, which each promise quality, but also can cost widely varying sums of money? Your options can be overwhelming at times. To help you solve your dilemma, I’ve uploaded a 32MB test video to two different sites for purposes of quality comparison. I’ve chosen the following services:

YouTube:

This guy is arguably the 800 lb gorilla of the bunch. With YouTube, you’ve likely maximized your chances for large viewership (assuming you’ve got any talent with a camcorder). On the other hand, the massive amount of video YouTube handles means they’ve got to limit the size of anything uploaded to 1GB, and processing seems to reduce the quality of anything uploaded that’s above SD quality (640×480 resolution). Honestly though, it’ll be hard for you to hit that limit, and you really don’t want to anyway. That would takes ages and ages to upload.

Dailymotion:

Dailymotion is pretty cool. The interface is slick, and while uploading gives you an estimate of the status, which you don’t get with most video services. On the other hand the upload is slow – it averaged around 50kbps while I was uploading the test video, which works out to 10 12 minutes to upload, plus processing time. Maximum allowable duration is twenty minutes, and max upload size is 150MB.

Overall, Dailymotion seems to do a better job of maintaining video quality, though it’s still not perfect. It is a compelling reason to use the service, though, especially if you’re doing it to share with people and not simply to try for a ton of views.

This one is a toss-up. The quality crown clearly goes to Dailymotion, but YouTube is more popular, more accessible, etc, etc, etc. It really comes down to your personal preference.

(Unrelated to video quality, but for some reason I had to physically adjust the dailymotion link so that it would show up centered. Thought it was worth mentioning if anyone decides to start using it).

Test Videos: Aiptek Action HD

So I promised some videos in my last post on the Aiptek Action HD, and here they are. I tried to cover a wide range of the Aiptek’s functions so you can get a good idea what it is (and isn’t) capable of.

First is a video taken while driving on the highway @ 70mph. No, I wasn’t shooting video and driving simultaneously. I got my little sister to hold the camcorder.

Review: Aiptek Action HD

As requested, my parents picked up an Aiptek Action HD camcorder for me for Christmas. Check out my video review + pictures below:

The product includes: