Choosing a UGC Site, Part 4: Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a general purpose UGC site that's advertising oriented—so much so that 15- to 30-second advertising spots appear before the videos that you embed in your website. If you can work around this issue, you'll find Dailymotion generally likeable, but not outstanding.
Dailymotion has three classes of uploaders: regular users, MotionMakers (which are generally indie production types), and Official Users (which includes record labels, studios, news media, and other content creators), with the latter two categories able to upload videos of unlimited duration with higher quality encoding. Regular users can upload videos up to 20 minutes long and 2GB in size, which is generous.
Video quality was generally good. Dailymotion produced all videos in H.264 format, with our 720p HD video at 1506 kbps; not up there with Vimeo, YouTube and VideoPress in terms of data rate, but sufficient for good quality in our test file (which I usually encode at 800 kbps for codec torture tests). The screencam file was a surprising 960x720 and looked great, while DV quality was the best in the review, perfectly scaled and deinterlaced. The only blip was our 640x360 test file, which the site downsampled to 512x288—all other sites encoded at the uploaded resolution.
Dailymotion encoded all videos to multiple data rates, presenting SD/HQ playback options for SD videos, and an SD/HQ/HD option for HD videos, allowing the user to choose their quality level.
Embed controls are good and include a Flash player and a beta iframe player. The iframe enables playback in Apple mobile devices and other compatible HTML5 players, and worked fine on my iPad (it played videos with no advertising!). You can choose your size and colors; write intro text, a headline and a summary; and auto start playback at a specified time within the video.
HD Test File
DailyMotion - HD_Test_10mbps
Uploaded by janleeozer. - Videos of the latest science discoveries and tech.
SD Test File
Screencam File
DV File
iPod Touch File
Jan Ozer's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net