Last week I was reading the Students Free Culture Blog and came across a great post on using online video. These suggestions were written by: Nelson Pavlosky

• Exercise your fair use rights - If you don’t use it, you lose it! When you need to quote something or reference something, do it, don’t be scared. Just follow the Center for Social Media’s “Code of Best Practices in Fair use for Online Video“.
• Open content licenses - Make it obviously legal to share, cut up and remix your content. Use a Creative Commons license that allows for remixing. (All current CC licenses allow for sharing, at least for noncommercial purposes.)
• Encourage remixing - Provide a copy of the video in an uncompressed, unedited form somewhere. This can make it easier for people to reuse your content in future projects.
• Provide a copy in an open video format - Use the Ogg Theora video format! It’s an open standard, meaning we know exactly how it works, and it is not patent-encumbered, meaning we don’t know of any patents that would prevent you from using it however you want, and nobody can force you or anyone else to pay royalties for the “privilege” of using the format. See Xiph.org’s page on Theora’s benefits and why Ogg Theora matters for internet TV. Blip.tv allows you to upload in Ogg Theora and it will attempt to play Theora videos in your browser using the Cortado java video applet (see the Inquirer article on this).
• Provide multiple formats - That said, you should try to provide as many video formats as practical. Give people options, in case they have trouble playing or using one or more of your formats. Just make sure one of those options is always an open format.
• Open source video editing - When possible, capture and edit your videos with open source tools, and promote those tools to others. Unfortunately, it is currently difficult to do FOSS video editing on Mac OS X. It is slightly easier to do it on Linux with tools such as Kdenlive, Kino, and Cinelerra, and Linux distributions dedicated to working with multimedia such as Ubuntu Studio. Also, the next version of VLC media player, 0.9, is expected to make it easy to do screencasting / screen capturing on any platform, with a nice GUI / wizard to walk you through the process.
• Open source media server - Use open source software to serve up your video. This is easy if you are video podcasting: any blogging software that produces a web feed with enclosures will do, such as Wordpress. In fact, with Wordpress, all you have to do is link to your video file in a format WordPress knows about (MP3 and MP4, from quick testing).  This automatically packages the video in an enclosure in your RSS feed so that anyone with a smart feed reader can automatically download the video. The Podpress plugin for Wordpress should make this even easier. An open source media server for streaming video can be a bit more complex. The option I am helping SPARC pursue at the moment is ePresence, an apparently mature open source project which unfortunately requires a Windows computer at the moment, but which is supposed to be migrating to Linux in the distant future.
• Open source client - People should be able to view the video using 100% open source software, and you should encourage them to do so. Miro, a free / open source internet tv and video player, is great for podcasting. As for streaming media, just make sure it plays in VLC.
• Offer a downloadable format - Sometimes people want to access video while not connected to the Internet. Offering a download link lets people with slow connections watch your high resolution video through the power of delayed gratification. Also, letting people download your stuff aids distributed preservation.
• Decentralized distribution system - Services like Youtube offer convenience, but we at Students for Free Culture believe any one player monopolizing video distribution is bad. It’s good to preserve options of self-hosting and self-aggregating available, and to use them in parallel with other distribution methods.
• Redundancy and long-term preservation - Post your video to multiple locations so if one goes down it will still be available. Be especially sure to use the Internet Archive, as that is meant for long-term preservation. (Blip.tv will crossload video to the Internet Archive for you.)
• Provide good metadata - Tags and other descriptors can make it easier for people to find your video. Thumbnails can make it easier to skim through your content (automatically provided by Internet Archive). Categorize! Annotate!
• Write out a transcript - Gives you more googlejuice / makes your site more attractive to search engines! Also more accessible for the disabled.
• Provide feeds and other ways to subscribe to your content - If people like what you have, make it easy for them to get further updates.
• Bookmarking / social networking / embedding - make it easy for people to save the location of a video, and to share it with others. Naturally, try to support open source tools when possible, such as the Connotea scholarly bookmarking software.
• UPDATE: Film in the highest quality possible, and compress for the web later - Do not film in low-resolution with a mediocre camera simply because Youtube videos are typically low-resolution. First of all, High Definition video is slowly gaining in popularity on the web, as bandwidth and storage become cheaper and screens get bigger and higher-density pixelwise. Distribution platforms like Miro make it easy for even people with sluggish internet connections to enjoy HD video, since Miro and other podcasting software can download content when you are not around (e.g. when you are sleeping) and serve it to you later. Although you will want a low-res version for people with slower internet connections, you should also publish an HD version for those early adopters on the cutting edge. Second of all, you can reduce the quality of your video by compressing it or reducing the resolution (e.g. by digitally zooming in on a person’s face) whenever you like, but it is impossible to increase your video to a higher resolution if you did not record a high-resolution version. Capture the best video you can, and compress it later to make the file size small enough to fit through the Intertubes.

Read more and make comments on the SFFC Blog: Best practices for online video