guapacha.com

Thanks to db, or maybe josh, yesterday I bought a Flip Ultra camcorder so I can join the video blogging craze, or something. Yes, I know I have three perfectly good camcorders at home but none of them are the sweet, easy to carry and use size of the Flip. I figure I will keep it in my bag, whip it out (so to speak) when the mood strikes. Hell, maybe I’ll record some video for the Wailing Cat sometime.

My first impression was a little underwhelming, actually. But the joy is in it’s simplicity. There’s no complicated buttons, just turn it on, point it at something, hit record, hit stop. Then it plugs right into your computer and you can use the supplied software to save/upload or any of your own tools. The video quality ain’t bad for $150. The trick is finding a hosting site that does a decent job of encoding the file but doesn’t take forever to do it.

First, I used good old YouTube which is the de facto standard, I guess. It processes pretty fast but the quality sure ain’t great:

DB tried Vimeo which did a much better job in terms of quality but took a long time to upload and encode. Rather than rehash the same experiment, I tried Viddler which was pretty quick, at least as fast as YouTube, I think, but I’m not sure the quality is improved any.

I’ll probably sit back and let josh and db figure out the best solution, they’re good at that kind of thing. In the meantime, I am pondering registering guapacha.tv for my video blogs, but at $25 a year it makes one think twice.