Sharkle is a simple, straight-forward, family-friendly free video sharing website. While not as well-known as some sites like Google Video or YouTube, if you're just trying to get your video seen, it's a perfectly good forum.
Free
You retain the rights to all your work, though you grant them an irrevocable license to use, excerpt, and distribute your video. Sharkle, like most free video sharing sites, does not allow copyrighted, obscene, slanderous, or otherwise offensive content.
Sharkle provides an "embeddable player" feature, which you can use on your personal website as long as you provide a prominent link back to Sharkle. You must be over 18, or else 13 with parental consent, to use Sharkle.
Sharkle asks for a username and password as well as your email, country, zip code, and occupation. You are also given the option at signup of receving message notifications via email, and of deciding whether others can add tags to your video without your permission. You then check the "I agree to Sharkle's Terms & Conditions" and are taken right to a page with an upload button.
The uploader requires you to enter a title, category, tags, and a description, and decide whether to set your video to public or private.
You can see how much has uploaded, but there's no progress bar, and it's not very fast. Sharkle accepts videos up to 100MB in size, and supports an unusual number of file types, including all .mpeg formats (.mpg, .dat, .vob, .ty), all .avi, .asf, and .wmv files, all quicktime/.mov files, as well as less typical formats like .vivo, .fli, .rm, .nuv, yuv4mpeg/yuv4mpeg2, .film, .RoQ, .ogg/.ogm, .pva, and .nsv. Visit Sharkle's video formats page for an overview of all these file types.
Sharkle enables tagging, but you can't edit the tags after the video has uploaded.
Sharkle's video window is small and looks pretty good, if a little bit dark; you can blow it up to slightly smaller than postcard size, but it looks pretty awful when you do.
Unlike sites like Google Video, the currently playing video only takes up about a third of the page. To the left are bars showing popular tags and categories, to the right news and a listing of recently online members. Expanding the video does not get rid of these.
To share a Sharkle video, you can click the "Send Video" link under the player to send a message and a link to the video to your friends. You can also copy and paste the permalink URL provided further down the page to link to the video in emails or on other websites, or copy and paste the HTML code underneath to embed the video itself in another site.
