Sharing large files over the web with Dropbox

YouTube and other video sharing sites make it easy to share your video with an audience as large or as small as you like, but these sites are really set up for streaming your content rather than easily allowing downloads. While there are some workarounds or exceptions, sometimes you simply want to be able to shoot someone a link to your video so they press a button and voilà, your file just starts downloading to their computer.

E-mail is not a realistic option as most e-mail services have strict file size limits for attachments, usually between five to 25 MB, and you will often need to send a file that is many times that size!

The easiest solutions today are the various cloud storage services out there. We'll take a look at Dropbox, but there are additional options out there such as Google Drive, Amazon S3, box.net, SugarSync, and many, many more.

Getting ready

First off, you need to understand that you are unlikely to be able to send an uncompressed...