The iPhone 3G S comes already set up to easily share your videos on YouTube, but is that really the best service to share your iPhone videos on?
The videos are compressed and uploaded straight to YouTube from your phone which makes it incredibly convenient. The key step in that process is the video compression that takes place. This allows you to upload much larger videos straight to YouTube than anything you’re allowed to email from your iPhone.
Up until now I’ve mostly stored larger HD video files on my hard drive with a couple redundancy backups and smaller videos that I took with my Canon digital camera I shared on Picasa. Now, with the addition of iPhone videos in the mix I wanted to make the move to a video hosting sites to share my videos.
The bad news for Vimeo users is that sharing files remotely from the iPhone is going to be severely limited by the file size limitations put on attachments. For example, you can only email five photos at the same time. So far it’s been my experience that around one minute seems to be the cutoff point for the length of a video that you can email to Vimeo, or anywhere for that matter. And it doesn’t look like Vimeo is going to be giving the iPhone any love anytime soon.
As of now I haven’t found a video too large to upload to YouTube from the iPhone. I just published a video that was well over three minutes with no problems at all and it did it relatively quickly. It seems as though the 2GB upload limit may very well apply to the iPhone as well. If that’s the case you will have the ability to upload extremely long videos from your iPhone to YouTube.
If you’re looking to instantly publish your 3G S videos and not wait until you can upload from a computer YouTube is hands down the way to go, thanks to the built in compatibility nothing else can even come close.
This is not good news for Vimeo or Posterous for that matter (the latter being what I use to publish nearly all of my mobile content). Qik has an app in beta that will theoretically allow users to upload nearly live video limited only by the amount of space on your phone, although that is pure conjecture on my part. I have an email into the creators of Posterous and Qik to see what they have anything they’d like to add to this conversation.
At the very least I’d like to see an iPhone channel on YouTube to easily view all the mobile videos coming in from around the world. Let’s hear it iPhone 3G S early adopters, what has been your experience with sharing iPhone videos with your readers, friends and family?
