Although there are now hundreds of websites that allow you to upload and share videos, the true giant in the field is YouTube.
While not the best or brightest of sites by any means, it is simple, straightforward and accessed by the millions every day. If you just want to put your work out there where it’ll be seen, this is the site for you.
Free
The signup is simple: Provide an email address and a zip code, then pick a username and password. YouTube will send you a confirmation email, and you are immediately able to upload videos.
Uploads are limited to 100MB, and they can take a while – the site says about 1-5 minutes per MB, which could translate to a couple of hours spent uploading a five-minute video if your internet connection is feeling a little lethargic.
YouTube will compress any videos you upload, and this can really do a number on image quality, which is why so many YouTube videos look patchy or grainy.
The only real way to get around this is to make sure you’re uploading the highest-quality video that will fit within their size restrictions. Depending on your video’s length and format, different compression settings will yield different results – you may have to experiment a little.
When uploading your video, YouTube will ask you to enter ‘tags’ – keywords that can be used to search your video. The more tags you enter, the more ways there are to search for your video.
If you don’t want everyone to be able to search for your video, you can set your video to "private" and enter names and emails for the people who are allowed to see it.
If, on the other hand, you’re interested in as many people seeing it as possible, you can embed YouTube videos in other websites, such as eBay or Myspace.com.
Content that is obscene, illegal, harmful, violates copyright, etc. is not allowed.
It’s important to know that while you retain the ownership rights to whatever you post to YouTube, by uploading you grant YouTube the right to do whatever they want with your video. Also, any YouTube member can easily copy it, steal it, reproduce it, sell it, whatever, without any kind of permission or reparation. So if you have a really brilliant piece of work you’re hoping to sell, don’t put it on YouTube.
To share a YouTube video, you can email it or embed it in a blog. To email it to friends, click the “Share video” link under the player and enter email addresses in the window that opens.
Click the “Post video” link directly under the Share link to post it to a blog. You can then post it to Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Reddit or StumbleUpon by clicking the icon that shows up, or set up a blog such as LiveJournal to post the video to.
There is a URL you can use to link to the video to the right of the player; just underneath that is HTML code you can copy and paste to embed the player in another website.
