I’m torn. With the launch of Firefox 3.5, the new video tag might finally kick off for real - allowing you to embed video files in your webpages, which makes hosting and delivering your videos pretty much painless. Flash videos have been around for ages now, but Flash support in Linux is not great, and you need to get some sort of flash video player (I recommend Flowplayer) before being able to embedding them. Of course you also have to transcode your videos to the flash video format.

Of course, if you’re using flash videos you can always use an online service such as YouTube to offload some of the hosting to someone else. If you’re running a website with a lot of traffic, that could be a real money-saver. But if that’s not a problem for you, for example if you don’t have a lot of traffic (or if you’re filthy rich), hosting your own videos might be a good thing - as that will allow you to embed them in whatever format you choose.

On the other hand, not everyone has a browser that supports the video tag, and unless you have a flash video to fall back on, you’re excluding them from viewing your content.

I think that for now I will probably keep hosting my videos on Youtube and embedding them in flash format. While I’m no fan of the .flv format, I realize that from an SEO perspective, hosting the videos there gives me some extra exposure - and that’s always good!

What about you? Will you be sticking to flash video or will you move on to bigger and better things?