I’ve been using Vimeo recently. It has a basic free service that lets you upload upto 500 mb of videos each week. All video hosting sites display uploaded footage as compressed flash streams, but Vimeo viewers can download the original file. This is very good for my parents who want to see my baby son Jake reach his milestones in high quality video. It has standard embed and sharing to show the video in this blog and in my Facebook feed. I am a little concerned about the new terms of service from next month that disables the download feature after a week. I could pay $60 for a premium account that enables this feature, but what happens if this site suddenly stops working in China?

Jake Crosses The Bridge from Matt Seigal on Vimeo.

Call it paranoia, but I have been trying out alternative solutions. I have just activated the free two month trial of Apple’s MobileMe. This offers upto 20 GB of online storage, which can be shared with others. It is convenient that it integrates so easily into IMovie, but it took some research and Vaper’s Video tag plugin for WordPress to be able to embed the uploaded Quicktime movies into my blog. I need to remember to add a link to the file if I want my family to download high quality videos of Jake. I’m confident that MobileMe will not be blocked in China, because it is not available to subscribers in this country and it is expensive at $99 a year. I may be tempted to shop on Ebay or Amazon for MobileMe at a discount of upto 50 percent.

I also tried the Indian video hosting site Viddler. Each uploaded video can be upto 500 mb and viewers have a download option that is not yet restricted to paying customers. Videos can be crossposted as an embed into blogs, but this feature does not seem to include Facebook. Perhaps Viddler will be blocked if it catches on as a place to host sensitive footage, but it’s not a household name like Youtube so it may slip through the cracks of a social media crackdown.

Another solution was to use ftp to upload a Quicktime video to my Dreamhost server and to embed the video into my blogpost. This works in a very similar way to embedding MobileMe videos. The advantage is I can move my blog and videos together if my site is ever blocked. The disadvantage is that I am paying for a basic shared hosting plan and performance may be slower than other solutions especially if the files are large. It may be OK, because I only serve videos to a few people.

There are other solutions, but these are hampered by practical issues. I could use Witopia as my virtual private network to hop over the Great Firewall of China to upload footage to Youtube and other blocked services, The problem is that Witopia has been painfully slow in recent weeks and Chinese friends will not be able to see my videos. I could upload videos to Chinese hosting sites like Tudou and Youku, but they are slow outside China and do not offer download options as far as I could see.

What is the best way for someone in China to share videos with the outside world? I’m going to use Viddler, MobileMe and my personal webhost. I hope that no more video sharing services get blocked. If they do then I have a way to share my memories of Jake with my family around the world.