With over 100 clips spanning 10 categories and growing, StockFootageForFree.com is a great source for free broadcast quality stock video clips. All you have to do is fill out a simple form and you can download free fullsize SD clips (NTSC 720×480 29.97fps DV AVI) for use in your productions. Currently offering useful categories like Nature, Sports, Transportation, Cities/Locations and more, your sure to find something and the price can’t be beat.
Learn more at http://www.stockfootageforfree.com
Adding Flash Video to a website without using a service like Vimeo or YouTube can be challenging if you are not a Flash Action Script expert. Maybe you have a intranet or paid content site and you need to host the video files on your own server and want to display the files in a custom player that matches the look of your site.
Enter the Flowplayer, a free (GPL License) highly customizable Flash Video player jam packed with all the features you might need for you progressive or streaming video website.
Don’t have a camera that can shoot HD? Need HD stock footage for compression testing or maybe a few high resolution textures for your next project? Look no further than OpenFootage.net. Offering up gorgeous timelapse shots at 1080p, 720p, PAL, and NTSC, all of their content is available for free under a Creative Commons license. Not content only offering free HD stock footage, they also have super high-res panorama photos and sweet textures. You won’t find 10,000 files spanning 100 categories, but what they have so far is top-notch and hopefully the collection will continue to grow.
If you like what you see and use it in a project, make sure to donate a few dollars via the Paypal link on their site so that they are able to keep this great resource available.
Vimeo is not the newest kid on the block offering free video sharing, but that doesn’t stop them from having some of the coolest features in the neighborhood. I can sum it all up in two letters “HD”, and I mean for real — 1280x720p high-quality Flash Video. Not too many other sites can top that. Even YouTube’s new high(er)-quality videos don’t even come close to what Vimeo is offering. Plus, add a clean website, cool embeddable player, great community and developer API and you have a recipe for web video nirvana. Currently, Vimeo is offering users up to 500mb upload per week with the only requirements that you upload original works that are not a commercial, infomercial, or other ad and are not adult oriented. They accept HD or SD aspect ratios in the following formats: asf, asx, avi, divx, dv, dvx, m4v, mov, mp4, mpeg, mpg, qt, wmv, 3g2, 3gp, 3ivx and 3vx. They are able acheive such great results by using the On2 VP6 codec which is the current leader in FLV encoding due to the quality vs filesize and widespread Flash player support. Newer versions of Flash also support H.264 MP4 encoding which is even better than the On2 VP6 codec, but at this time it is not widely supported and is license restricted for commercial use.
New to video encoding? They also have comprehensive tutorials on how to acheive great results.
Sign up for a free account today and be sure to post your experience and video links in the comments.
SUPER Open Source Video Encoder & Player
The Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer (SUPER) is the Swiss Army knife of video transcoders. It can encode and decode virtually any media file and offers a plethora of options for encoding web videos. Although similar to MPEG Streamclip, SUPER seems to be more stable, advanced, and user friendly and does not rely on the QuickTime player for codec support.
Features
Here is a screenshot (click for larger image):
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