Flickr has a little known, and not oft-used ability for users to upload videos, as well as photos.  As Flickr is primarily a photo site for photo enthusiasts, the purpose of Flickr videos was not to host the latest Shakira music video or Baby Bloopers w/Gangsta Rap soundtrack – but rather to augment one’s photographic exploits with moving pictures as well.  Thus the reasoning behind Yahoo! putting a 90-second limit on Flickr video.

But, as photo display quality is such a hallmark of Flickr photos, I decided to do a little comparison on video quality, and compare it to the 900lb Gorilla, YouTube.

Following is a video I took of the first mountain bike ride on my new mountain bike, taken yesterday.  It’s got a lot of full-screen motion, a worst-case scenario for the Flash Video encoders both at Flickr and YouTube.  Here’s how they look:

FLICKR:

 

YOUTUBE:

Interestingly enough, it appears to me that the YouTube video is a bit crisper and has better motion details than the Flickr video.   YouTube used to have positively the worst video quality, but it looks like they’ve definitely made some improvements of late.

But then, in terms of a features comparison, let’s take a look at the way these two services display video, to get an idea of which would be the better context to display such video clips in:

Video Tools:

YouTube is obviously the hands-down winner here.  They offer annotations, audio change-outs (so you can swap out my grunting and “whoa nelly” with Crystal Method or whatever), the ability to change out the displayed thumbnail, closed-captioning, etc.   Flickr offers no such tools – just the ability to upload, and then edit the caption, title & tags just like any Flickr Photo.

Display Context:

image Probably the best reason why one would want to display your videos on Flickr is the display context of your video.  If you’re in the middle of a camping trip, and you take 10 photos and 2 videos with your digital camera, it makes the most sense to be able to display all of those items in the same place.  Displaying just the photos on Flickr or Photobucket or Facebook, and then putting the videos on YouTube doesn’t allow you to simply send someone to one page, and have them be able to see your trip.

To wit, see this set of my recent cross-country trip, which has a number of videos interspersed with the photo content – but the photo content all kept in order and in context.

Also, Flickr gives you the ability to display all your photos on a map, which gives yet another option for display context. 

Mobile Capabilities:

Now this is an area where I would have expected YouTube to be in the lead completely, but Yahoo! has been putting quite a bit of work lately into their mobile sites.  If you browse to this video on Flickr using an iPhone browser, you’ll see the page reformatted for the iPhone, complete with working video links.  Clicking on the video then pulls up an H.264 version of the video that is playable on the iPhone.  Slick!