The YouTube Of Tomorrow
DivX’s new Stage6 site will host, for free, pretty much any legal DivX-encoded content you like, with much better quality than GooTube.
Stage6 video files are of course generally much bigger, and you need to install their special player extension, and the site still seems to have that occasional GooTube problem where you upload a video and then it never goes live.
But I consider this a small price to pay to be able to watch (and download!) stuff like A Gentlemen’s Duel and Team Roomba’s hilarious instalments one and two of their TF2 griefing, in decent resolution.
(Unlike many other video hosting services, Stage6 does not have interstitial ads, or weird code that only works right on Internet Explorer. Actually, the current FAQ notes that “The Stage6 beta website is optimized for experience in the Mozilla Firefox browser. It may kind of work in IE as well.”)
As a test, I’ve uploaded my battling robot bugs video from the other day to Stage6; it’s here. I think the stereo audio improves it considerably.
(Joey, the Amazing Fetching Cat may now also be enjoyed in higher resolution and stereo on Stage6. He’s here.)
Why this won’t catch on: You need to install their player, from an untrusted third party.
Well, you could probably trust DivX, but it may lead to clone sites that each want you to install their “special” player, as well.
On a side note, I’d like to know if the video stream can be saved locally and converted to other formats, like .FLV can.
Overall, Microsoft’s Silverlight already streams high-def and more, and will work on PC, Mac, and Linux browsers. :)
Comment by Rask — December 31, 2007 @ 2:34 am
The download link right next to the big play button lets you download every video in plain DivX AVI format.
Comment by Daniel Rutter — December 31, 2007 @ 2:38 am
Ooooh, Silverlight! That’s entirely ubiquitous and everything! I remember just an hour ago I was like “Honey, have you seen this new Microsoft(tm) Silverlight(r) video streaming in high definition?” And she just clucked at me “Microsoft(c) Silverlight(ymca) video is everywhere, Aaron. You are standing in the middle of a revolution!”
Comment by zenboy — December 31, 2007 @ 3:55 am
Also, given Adobe’s crap track record of security problems, shady-URLs-for-callback, and overall shitty software, I’d call them an untrusted third party vendor too, but everybody has Flash installed (who are the two parties we’re talking about here anyways? Microsoft, apparently and… who? Novell?).
Comment by zenboy — December 31, 2007 @ 3:57 am
I don’t see a download link on the page you linked at the end (the cat video) without installing the plug-in. I’d rather not fill my browser up with more site-specific cruft than absolutely necessary, especially when my computer already has perfectly good DivX-playing software.
However, poking through the embed code and stealing the url “http://video.stage6.com/2007270/.divx” yielded a perfectly playable 2007270.divx file
Comment by evilspoons — December 31, 2007 @ 6:12 am
On Safari I didn’t need to download anything (although I think I had previously installed the DivX codec for quicktime, but anyway, no special player)
By the way Dan, you look pretty good for 58 :-)
Comment by tgdavies — December 31, 2007 @ 6:40 am
I have to agree that I also quite like Stage6. I’ve been using it for about 3 months or so. However, it does have the caveat that its search sucks very badly. It used to only look for any word in your query, I think it now looks for all of them, but then still appends the any results at the end. In any case, its hard to find stuff on it.
I wish more sites would use the divx web player, since its very simple to imbed on a page. All they need to do is have the .divx file on the server, and this page can create the embed code: http://labs.divx.com/WebPlayerCodeGenerator . I have actually been using it on other sites so I could stream their divx files instead of having to wait for them to download.
Comment by OgreMustCrush — December 31, 2007 @ 8:36 am
It seems to work with the mplayer plugin under Linux… no 3rd party cruft here…
Comment by ex-parrot — December 31, 2007 @ 10:50 am
Team Roomba are
hilarious
Comment by Rob L — December 31, 2007 @ 11:52 am
Wow, it worked for me under Linux, with totem. No seekbar, but still, rather impressive.
Comment by nynexman4464 — December 31, 2007 @ 12:31 pm
Totem /never/ has a seekbar. At least, I’ve never found a video which made it have one in a browser. I think the mplayer plugin is definitely better.
Comment by ex-parrot — December 31, 2007 @ 3:00 pm
Oh, I didn’t realize there was an mplayer plugin (I missed your comment). I’ll have to give that a shot.
Comment by nynexman4464 — January 1, 2008 @ 3:31 am
As of February 28, stage6 will be shut down.
See http://www.stage6.com/blog/107/
Comment by Bort — February 26, 2008 @ 12:01 pm