Off topic.

An excellent video here, found via the Radiohead blog. It comes with a personal recommendation from band members Colin and Jonny. It's a remix of the song Nude from the new Radiohead album that appears to be played entirely with preprogrammed technology. Whether it's "for real" (what ever that could mean in this context) I'm not sure, but the effect is fantastic.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Daily Motion, another HD video sharing site.

Whoops. this one slipped past me: www.dailymotion.com, a French video sharing site (don't worry the site is in English) is also now offering HD video sharing. You need to get registered as a "MotionMaker" but you do this simply by uploading an original piece of work and labelling as creative content. Once you're approved you get to have 720p video (up to 25fps) and unlimited time and file size uploads (Normal users are limited to 250MB or 20 minutes per movie)

It's easy. I uploaded Lenny's Luck, labeled it "creative content". Within two hours I'd been given MotionMaker status. Very flattering, - the video has since been removed. Based on a quick comparison, I couldn't see any difference between the picture quality of the online file from Vimeo or Daily Motion (both encoded from the same source file), the files are both 1280x720 On2 VP6 with stereo 44.1 MP3 stereo sound at about 840Kb/s; sharpness, brightness, gamma and colour all seemed identical.

Of course Vimeo still offers a couple of other sweeteners that separate it, such as the ability to download the full quality original source file and the option to swap out the movie with a newer updated version (something that's happened to Lenny's Luck a few times!).

Update: Tuesday 8. April 08 - actually after a bit of playing, Dailymotion is beginning to sneak in a couple of extra plusses. Its embedded player is HD capable, whereas with Vimeo you need to go to the Vimeo site to see content in HD, and I'm finding on older hardware (such as my 2 year old iMac PPC G5) that the Dailymotion video plays at a much better frame rate - at 24p, on my G5 Dailymotion is dropping a frame or so a second, whereas on Vimeo 24p plays consistently at about 12fps. However, faster moving material, such as the (dreadful) Wanted trailer that's been hosted in HD drops a LOT more frames on that computer, so your milage may vary.

I still much prefer Vimeo's site design. It definitely gives a feel that the site, and the movie's page is about YOUR movie, wheras Dailymotion has a definite youtube-esque/viral video/"hey there's a ton of other crap you could surf to right now" vibe to it.

2nd Update: Friday 11. April - scratch that frame rate advantage. Dailymotion are now running extremely intrusive animated Flash adverts on the movie pages (Vimeo already ran flash ads on movie pages but farther down the page rather than right next to your film). This means a major performance drop for HD and even some SD material. At least Youtube shares advertising revenue with users if it posts ads on your page (which it only does in agreement with the user) or Vimeo posts ads but leaves your page free of links to other films.