We are back from Disney World!

What a wonderful trip. We are still too tired to tell our story, but you can see some of the videos and photos we took.

…… Leo

Update on our Video Home: It’s Vimeo!

We are back from our Disney vacation. Before I write about it, I need to tell you where I will be saving some of the trip’s videos.

In my last post I thought we would use DailyMotion to store the videos. Then I came across an August 2007 PC World article that rated 10 video sites. Wonderful article with the information I needed such as new video processing times, the scaling of the original video, video compression techniques used, and overall video quality.

From the article I decided to test the following sites:
- Blip.tv
- Veoh
- Vimeo
- Revver

The Test
I uploaded one of our trip videos that we took from our Cannon Powershot A700 camera. The camera takes VGA 640×480 AVI video (some would say almost 480p for TV). But instead of uploading the 113MB AVI file for the 1 minute video, I converted it first to a Windows Media .wmv 1500 kpbs file. I did this to reduce the video file size to 11MB and to ensure I do not reach some of the video site’s daily upload limit of 100 MB or a 500 MB weekly limit. The video quality of the Windows Media file is excellent - from my own eyes I would say 95% of the original AVI video file.

The Result
What I am looking for is video quality (80%) and processing time (20%). In the end I have chosen Vimeo. Below are the links to the videos from all sites.

- Blip.tv: Came in a close second. Site gives visitors the choice to see video in original format. Need pro account to set the default video format for uploaded files.
- Veoh: Video quality shade below than Vimeo, very good processing time.
- Vimeo: The winner for us regarding both video quality and processing time
- Revver: Took the longest processing time - almost 3 hours.

One thing I like about all the sites I tested is that they give you the choice to add advertisements to your video and to share in the revenue. If Buzznet decided to implement this strategy I would not have moved.

That’s it. Now I need to upload the videos and the photos.

… Leo

Looks Like We will Stop Using Buzznet…

… and say hello to Dailymotion.com.

[UPDATE April 6, 2008] - Read this post to see why we are now using Vimeo.

On January 14th, Buzznet reached an advertisement partnership with VideoEgg. The end result of this partnership is “bumper” advertisement embedded in our family videos (see image below).

And if that is not enough, they also show a 30 second ad before you get to see our family videos.

While I understand I am using free services for sharing our videos, I would rather see the inline ads on the bottom of the video, not embedded into the video has Buzznet has done.

Its too bad - Buzznet has served us well.

We Have Moved Again

Welcome to  sarahandleo.wordpress.com.

Our SarahandLeo.com site served us well since we launched the site back in September 2005.  But recently I found WordPress.com and its free blog services with 3 GB of space.  Our host provider for SarahandLeo.com offered 500 MB (now 1 GB)  for a fee and we had to pay for the domain registration.  I can not justify these costs today.

Back in September 2005, our family site hosted everything - our blog, photos and videos.  Now, our photos are on Flickr, the videos are on Buzznet, and this blog is on WordPress.com - all free.