Remember when I talked about converting my videos over to YouTube, Google Video, or some other online service?

I tried.  I tinkered with all of them and found the experience less than satisfying.  I realize using those services frees me from the bandwidth costs, compatibility issues, and even hosting overhead, yet the quality of the test videos was lacking at best.

The process to convert them leaves artifacts in the resulting video, the quality drops tremendously in some cases but not all (most, however, lose some degree of clarity and detail in both audio and video), and there’s no way for me to stop other people from using the videos on their sites.  Sure, I can set the video so it can’t be embedded at all, but then even I can’t use it directly and have to send people to the hosting site to see it.  That’s not how I want it to work.

So I’m still toying with the idea.  None of the available services has been satisfactory as far as I’m concerned.  Control over uploaded content is insufficient in all cases.  Quality degradation is problematic.  The list goes on.

Needless to say, I’ve still not negated the proposition of converting, but the experience to date makes it less likely.