I'm planning on sharing a few videos for my site: http://segakatana.com, and I would like to know which of the following you guys would recommend as the best. Would it be best to host all videos on Youtube and have the links on the site, or to host the videos and play them through a flash video player such as: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player. I'm not really sure how much bandwidth a flash video player would eat. Any help is appreciated, thanks!
Your probably ok going with youtube, though it may direct some traffic off your site. Borman uses flash player on his website IIRC, maybe he can chime in with his experience.
I take it you're using Flash so they'll be playable, stream etc. "out of the box"? The answer is, the bandwidth taken is the size of your Flash file! Or, if you use one that plays seperate files, the size of you video plus the size of your Flash file. External hosting is probably a good idea if you have limited bandwidth - videos are large and you don't need many views to rack up the traffic!
All depends on quality, compression etc. You could do a 1 min video in under 100k, or it could be 1Mb per second. Go for something that looks nice, not too big, and hopefully you'll get a reasonable file size. You could always have a trial run hosting yourself, and fall back on Youtube if necessary.
