Hello I am looking to maybe add some videos to a site, yet I am curious if it kills your bandwidth as in you use too much, or if its ok?

Also can you use You tube videos on your site? or do you have to ask for permission first?

Thanks

I did try the embedded video you tube thing on my site but found it to be very poor quality as you tube videos often are, however if your putting them on you tube yourself you have some control of what your adding to your site.

I ditched the idea and now host my own collection (much better quality) I firstly converted them to .swf file to reduce size, found a swf player and bingo, it does use a little more bandwidth & can take 3-4 seconds to load, but you can get some giant bandwidth server useage now so i dont think its really a problem

you dont have to ask to used youtube on your site but it does make it look unproffestional.

There is no need of permission of someone to adding video on own site.

Personally I think it depends on how you do it. Some sites look really crappy with the added YouTube videos but I have seen other sites where it actually looks quite nice.

As or traffic I don't thing you need to worry unless you have substantial amount of traffic.

Originally Posted by timothynblake

you dont have to ask to used youtube on your site but it does make it look unproffestional.

Youtube Embed video doesn't make a website crappy. Look at tigerdirect, they are not small frys, they embed their videos directly into product pages and it has increased sales as a result. It's the context around the video, how it's used that makes it crappy. Video content alone can make a video crappy.

Keep in mind you can now skin youtube videos, chromless player, etc. Not to mention make use of the youtube API that was released not so long ago. They are also supposedly upping the quality of the encoding so newer videos will look better.