Today is an awesome day! Because every day there's an update is an awesome day at The Turning Gate! And today's awesome update is CE4 Stage 6.1.3, which is primarily an awesome maintenance release, the awesomeness of which is subtle, like subtle undercurrents of flavor in a fine wine.
See the changelog for details, but the headline for 6.1.3 is the removal of support for embedded video from Google Drive.
Generally speaking, I do not remove features without having given due consideration. Support for embedded video from Google Drive was added in 6.1.1 in response to a user's request. Unfortunately, it was half-baked from the start, and that mostly because Google hasn't given us much of an oven to work with. Google Drive is a fine place to put your stuff, and makes sharing that stuff pretty easy; but it's not very elegant insofar as embedding video into a website. I've spent some time under-the-hood this week, and have come away annoyed and displeased, and so to hell with it. You want video on your website and should be using the best tools for the job, and I firmly believe that Google Drive does not deserve a place in that toolbox.
That brings us back to the three video options we started with:
- Self-hosted HTML5 Video
- Vimeo
- YouTube
These are the video options we're likely to stick with indefinitely, and maybe we ought to have a conversation about them and which you should be using.
HTML5 Video
HTML5 Video is the most labor and server intensive of your choices; we provide it as an option because we strive to be as modern and as flexible as possible, but for most users this is going to be the worst possible option. It requires a lot of setup, and some prerequisite knowledge.
Video files tend toward being large, and serving video directly from your server limits your capability to serve video at variable resolutions depending on the viewer's device. For example, you probably shouldn't be serving video at full 1080p to a smartphone visitor; and serving video at such a size will chew through your bandwidth in no time at all anyway. For those on shared hosting plans (Bluehost, GoDaddy, 1and1, etc.), this is absolutely not what you should be doing. Rather, choose one of the other two options.
YouTube
YouTube is something of a cultural phenomenon. It's hugely popular, and makes it supremely simply to upload and disseminate video to your followers. There is sometimes a tradeoff when availing yourself of free services, however, and YouTube may preface your video with advertising, or try to move viewers off of your site to YouTube.com ...
So if you're not down with YouTube, I get you. There's a time and a place and a type of person, and it's not for everyone.
Vimeo
If video is your bread and butter, then Vimeo is likely to be your jam. It has long been, and stands likely to remain, the preferred venue for video professionals, and offers several membership types to meet various needs, the lowest membership level being free. If video privacy, delivery and scalability are priorities, and you want to embed video beautifully into your website, without the hassle and bandwidth concerns of self-service, then Vimeo, Vimeo, Vimeo.
Seriously, of the three choices, Vimeo is the best choice for all stripes and my personal preference as well. If you're putting video online, then you should be putting it here. Vimeo is so well-suited to its purpose, I could do away with supporting HTML5 video and YouTube and not feel bad about it; I won't, but I could.
So there you have it. Google Drive support was a fine experiment, but these things don't always work out. I briefly considered replacing it with HTML5 video support for Dropbox, but then we'd still be dealing with scalability issues and limited bandwidth, so I'm just not going to waste my time on it. I think the triumvirat of HTML5, Vimeo and YouTube well cover users' various needs for video delivery, and so we're going to be sticking with that.
For those curious, the still above is from Gotye's "Easy Way Out", which remains one of my favorite music videos of all time. Watch it in our CE4 Stage HTML5 video demo, on Gotye's Vimeo channel, or on YouTube.
Enjoy the rest of your awesome day, and go ahead and have an awesome tomorrow too. Awesome? Awesome.