YouTube may be the most well-known video content provider on the web, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best. My biggest gripe is their atrocious video quality. Whatever YouTube uses to compress/reencode the video makes it borderline unwatchable. Nevermind if it’s a web series or a couple of idiots jumping off a roof with their bikes, everything on the site looks hideous. Heaven forbid that the video contains text because it will strain your eyes to their limits. Now, while I can appreciate the need for speed - a crappy looking video means it’s a smaller file size and can be streamed quicker - I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a little sacrifice in speed for better quality.

From an uploader’s perspective, I find it irritating that videos can’t be longer than 10 minutes. To compound this annoyance, uploads have been increased from 100megs to 1gig. Sure it sounds great in theory, but what’s the point if the length of the video is still capped? Does anybody really have a 10min video that’s 1gig that they’d purposefully upload to YouTube only to have its quality diminished? Doubtful.

I found a nice article on CNET that lists 4 alternatives to using YouTube. Personally, I only tried Vimeo and Veoh, but both of them were far superior in my opinion in terms of site structure and video quality. Vimeo was a bit of a stickler as to what I could and could not upload so I didn’t bother, but there were a number of nice hi-def videos available to watch. Veoh’s videos looked great too, and I could upload pretty much whatever I wanted, the only catch being that there’s a 500mb weekly limit, but that wasn’t a big deal for me.

I also found another list from chaos laboratory if the above alternatives didn’t tickle your fancy. I didn’t try any of their 31 flavors out for myself, so I can’t say if they’re any good or not, but I included it anyway to show the vastness of web video providers available.

While I can’t dispute YouTube’s appeal and namesake (I still visit there quite often myself), I’m not a big fan of the webvid titan. If they’d crank their video length to unlimited and ditch their eye cancer quality encoder for something higher def, I’d probably spend a lot more time there than looking for alternatives.