Is compressing videos worth it? (6)
I have been compressing videos before uploading them using a free program, but it seems very cumbersome. Is the trouble worth it?
These days, the internet is already fast enough so the need to compress videos is way lower than it used to be. On top of that, bigger videos usually also mean higher quality, which can have a positive effect on many levels.
On the other hand, higher quality videos can consume a lot of BW so you will need a more expensive hosting plan as soon as your traffic grows.
So it comes down to what you can afford and what you want to achieve.
Modern streaming platforms split your video into hundreds of chunks, which your browser downloads individually as you watch.
This is significantly faster and your browser can even adapt the quality of the chunks it picks as your bandwidth changes.
We use wystia and despite being astronomically expensive (paying 3k+ a month) does a great job.
Vimeo if you pay for the pro plan is nearly the same, but almost for free as it’s so cheap. I’d suggest starting here.
Most people have better things to do than muck about encoding videos, give Vimeo a try.
Originally Posted by nickpeplow
Thanks
Well... I'm compressing 50 percent of my videos now. 
Will take a final decision on which way to swing in two to three months.
I know that this thread is pretty old, but some practices remained the same, so it's maybe still worth sharing some thoughts here. If you plan uploading videos to your site, I would say that the best option would be not to compress them as that really can have a negative impact on their quality, but to host them outside of the site, on some third-party service, like Cloudinary, for example, or to extract links from YouTube as you can upload it as unlisted video there as well. If you keep big videos on your site, it might damage its performances and make it load slower, and if you compress them they won't look nice, so I would recommend this approach.
Home > Paid Traffic Sources >