Inkbunny has mp4 video up to 15mb which you can get a lot of miles out of.

Thanks for the advice. I've learned that e621.net does at least 71MB, and theoretically 100MB. I've also been told that they're intending to up that to 300MB but that's not from an official source.

Sheesh, what formats?

I'm not too familiar with that site. Somebody uploaded my old stuff on it by the looks of things. Insightful comments on there.

All of the videos seem to be in the WebM container format. So the codec would be VP8 or VP9. It's a free format, BSD licensed.

e621.net is basically a repost site. People who like your work on another site may post your work to e621.net, though they have a DNP list if you want to be exempted. I find it handy for finding new artists via their work. It has an extensive tagging system which rivals FA's (especially back when FA didn't even have a search feature!) You can upload your own work there if you wish. It seems to drive traffic to my FA page, as source can be attributed in the post on e621.net.

My one complaint, there is no way to have a thumbnail on a video or flash is there?

On e621.net, seemingly not. That goes for Flash files on that site too, actually.

I have to wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Given that animations are rarer than stills, it may be that each one gets more views because no one can resist the mystery box.

They can't do a little thumbnail with a little "play" icon on it? It's 2016 sheesh.

They probably can, but won't bother. e621.net is one of those Booru thingy websites. It's based on similar code to rule34.paheal.net. It's only designed for images, so Flash and WebM support is probably based on extensions and/or hack jobs.

I'm an advocate for open and free codecs, so of course I'd suggest Webm over the other options. Being more open means that more devices will support it, overall, but it's hard to say how big of a difference that will really amount to. I don't think there's a big difference that separates those high-efficiency formats, though - I suspect that for good quality encodes you'll just have to put in the bits per second, and deal with the resultant filesize that goes with that.

FA is woefully Web 1.5, to the point where it's hardly worth trying to optimize for it. Until FA gets its act together, your best option is probably to post to e621 or other more spacious site, and link to there from here with some kind of teaser (which could be as simple as a good still).

I don't know much about friendly encoders, but if you do find yourself stuck in command-line-encoding-land, I've done that sort of thing a few times and can probably lend a hand, or an ear.

Thanks for your input, buddy. And yes, you're right - you get what you pay for, size wise.

I've learned that more specifically, the fixtures are H.264 vs VP8 and H.265(namely HEVC) vs VP9. It seems that part of VP9's brief was specifically to trounce HEVC. Whether or not it has is another question, but it seems more modern. The only problem I've got with WebM files is they're a bit of a pain to view on my iPhone 4S (it was a hand me down, I swear I didn't give Apple a penny! Don't shoot! :P). H.264 MP4s play in the Safari browser, WebMs ask VLC to open them. That's an easy enough fix, but in practice it's clunky and sluggish by comparison. I tried some of the third party browsers which claim to support WebM on their desktop versions. I got worse results.

Opera Mini - WebM no, H.264 no*
Chrome - WebM no, H.264 no*
FireBollox - WebM ASKS SAFARI TO OPEN IT, H.264 no*

*Each browser tried to open QuickTime's video player, but just hung with a static play button.

I guess Android devices probably fare better than what crApple has to offer. I can't be bothered shaking my Nexus out of its low-power induced huff to try it out. Given I can't really be bothered using more than a couple of furry sites, e621.net is sort of deciding on WebM for me anyway. Guess I'll suck it up. I'd like to target VP9 over VP8 if it is 50% less artifacty by bitrate (another one of their design goals).

Finally, thank you for offering your help! It seems I've found a freeware VP9 encoder that runs on Windows (XMedia Recode). I'm testing it out just now, and it looks good!

Interestingly it looks like XMedia Recode uses Ffmpeg under the hood, which is actually the tool I would have suggested if you were to try command-lining it.

I tried converting a spare VP8 file to VP9. It works pretty well! I dropped the bitrate by 50% to test their claim, and although I spotted artifacts in a held frame immediately after a zoom, it looks almost identical to the original. That artifact could even have been down to generation loss.

I've just learned that some of the frames for my old animations were corrupted because of an out of date hard drive. I loaded the original file and rendered a replacement frame. An eight year old scene I'd made. This is like archival film restoration! So exciting!