Well that's what I'm asking in a sense, how does someone choose which version to embed over another? I love vimeo, but I also love Blip. How should I choose?

I use TubeMogul for multiple uploads because I'm lazy and it's handy. I don't have a proper blog, but I typically put a link to my YouTube posting on my MySpace "blog" (to push my ratings into the 'top rated' list -but you need a pretty big subscription base to even make that possible...). I've just started rendering my first HD posting for Vimeo (after not posting here forever..... funny you posted this tonight!)

I grew a beard. Mrs Mark kinda made me shave it off.

Wassup Clintus?

Okay, here's my thought on Vimeo. They let you post HD here. And it looks fantastic.

Youtube doesn't look that great. Blip doesn't look all that great. Viddler bugs the hell out of me with all those little comments and ads along the way.

Vimeo is the choice. Unless you really want to get paid. Then it's Revver who pays me every month.

Finally, I host the high quality versions (quicktime) on Libsyn, and I always post links to them as an option.

Those are some of the considerations.

By the way, good question. You did a great job starting a discussion. ;-)

I run a video podcast (rather than a vlog) and for that I use a similar approach to Izzy - I host my original files on Libsyn and that's the feed I run through FeedBurner to shoot into iTunes.

For video embeds I use Blip. I never tried Viddler or Revver. The strange thing is... I didn't even consider using Vimeo for my podcast embed stuff.

Vimeo seems like a community for artists, so this is where I have fun with video and get inspiration - try to better my craft. So, there ya go - my two cents.

Hey Clint-- for me its a balance between the quality of the player and the community. Vimeo is my fav right now for posting personal videos. The Flash transcodes are quite good and the community is videoblog friendly. A lot of other video hosts are more viral-oriented, which is fine if you have that type of a video. IMO the Blip player needs a lot of work but they are reliable and the support is top-notch.

Maybe I'm biased because I work here, but I started using Vimeo and became part of the community before I was ever hired, so I do have perspective on the matter.

Its not about plays or stats for me. Its about quality. Quality of the player, quality of the encode, quality of the viewership... I don't need fame or fortune from the videos I share with my friends. I don't need thousands of people to make an arbitrary judgment on me based solely on what they see in my videos. I want to have a personal understanding of those who watch my videos and understand the context behind their comments and likes. Random statistical numbers without context aren't interesting to me, its the interaction with people I know and respect that gives me joy.

I use Vimeo because I have always felt respected here.

I chose the host that I can hug the CEO.

Actually, in my case I have hugged lots of people that work for my host.

See - for the longest time, I *only* posted my blip videos of Pedal on the main site, I'd upload to a few other ones, but I always embedded the blip version.

But recently, I've been leaning towards, using blip as my main page player, cause it's powerful, it's fast loading and smooth. But I'm noticing that their individual video player is not as powerful, not as smooth, and not as fast :(

I still *love* Blip, but I'm thinking of using only Vimeo for the individual post embeds. Cause there's great share tools, great embed tools, people can heart it right from within the post, it's super fast, super smooth... I wish that the HD kicked on outside the site, but I understand why they can't do that yet.

So that's my call at the moment - Blip for my main page, cause it's a great player, and Vimeo for the post, cause it's wicked fast and has great picture and great share tools.

i post to 16 video host automatically.
i convert to 10+ device formats
all automatically.
i upload to viddler and using the api system we built.
it auto creates the rss feeds with attachments and i'm gonna be rolling it out in the next few months for everyone to be able to use.

socialninja.tv - not finished - but check links top right.

Hopefully you'll get a comment from one of the big guys from EpicFU, Rocketboom or AskANinja - they occasionally blog about their thinking on this score, or give some notes to the videoblogging group.

For a long time I just uploaded my videos directly to my web host and used PodPress (a WordPress plugin) to generate a feed that looks good in iTunes and provides a player inside the blog post. I'm not exactly a control freak, but I don't like being beholden to an external service, and I don't have enough viewers to be concerned with bandwidth costs.

I do think Vimeo's playback often looks better than Blip's.

For me, what to put on my site is mostly about whether it looks good, plays back reliably, and works in my feed. But I'm glad you brought this up, there's a lot of food for thought here as I get into reworking both my personal site and upcoming project. I have to think this stuff through very soon.

Thanks for poking me on this video Clintus. I have not usewde Vimeo hardly at all, purely because of time. We hosted all episodes for the first year on our own servers, costing about $200 a month. Then we started putting things on blip, figuring, it is is good enough for [fill in show of choice] it would be good enough for us.

Much as I love the people at blip and their customer service response is wonderful, I am not wild about it these days. I post daily for Beach Walks with Rox so I see or experience the "blips" that others may not. A month does not go by without some sort of little problem. But those little problems make my long day even longer, and we get recurring complaints about the slowness of the episodes to play. We do our flash encoding bc theirs is not up to par for us.

And for reasons I cannot exactly define, our traffic reportedly went down once moving there, tho I would have expected it to go up. I don't know if it is their filters on the logs (we can see and process raw logs on our own servers) or if it is the slowness so people bail or what.

We don't use the player bc if someone embeds it to their blog regarding a specific post, it just pulls in the most recent post, which of course makes no sense. Tho it is nice for someone who wants to sit and watch several episodes in a row, which our viewers do often.

We also cross post to TubeMogul to get it on youtube, myspace, and dailymotion all at once, and to get nice stats.

We have also started cross-posting to Viddler as we LOVE C and the commenting abilities there.

But we are frequently re-evaluating bc there is no once place that handles things well the way we would like, for a *show.*

For more personal vids and extra vids, we put them on our social network, The Reef - which you are all invited to join:
reef.beachwalks.tv

Libsyn is a great idea but they are more for backup IMO as the service does go down on a somewhat recurring basis and their business model is hard for me to understand - if people post a lot it is doomed.

We choose to embed the Blip player on epicfu.com. We love the professional looking white label feature, customer service is top-notch, and they've grown organically w/ the community. It also lets us be in control of the quality of our Flash encoding. We have had recent trouble with uploads sometimes failing and delayed playback. I'm sure they're working to fix these bugs.

We don't post EPIC-FU to Vimeo because we don't view it as a site for shows. Vimeo seems to be geared towards personal and/or artistic videos, so I don't think a show would be well received. But, I love using Vimeo for my personal videoblogs or for behind-the-scenes videos of EPIC-FU. It's definitely my favorite video community.

We post on YouTube mainly because of its prominence in the video hosting world and to expose our show to new viewers. Although the community is mercurial and the transcoding is not the best quality, it's very reliable and fast.

We have recently been using TubeMogul, but since we do a lot of customization (custom thumbnails, tags, etc), we still have to spend time uploading individual videos to certain sites, which does take time.