The admin for the forum can decide what formats are allowed for upload. I never upload pictures or video directly to this forum. Here is why. John is currently running this forum using the same shared hosting service I'm using for a small private web site. I had my web site set up so I could upload all my trail camera pictures. Only co-owners and guest of our farm had access to the site so I wasn't worried about poachers using the information against me.
At any rate, I got an email from them one day saying there was a problem with the site. Before I could respond, they shut down the site. While the technical support folks were very polite and accommodating, the site admins would not turn the site back on. Even though the service was "Unlimited", they pointed to some fine print in the Terms of Service that basically said that they could deny service at any time if their site admins decided that anything you were doing jeopardized performance of other users. The decided that my trail camera pictures were in some way doing that. Even though I pointed out that the offered free picture gallery software and forums that did the exact same thing they did not budge. They forced me to remove all the trail camera pictures and swear I would not put them back on the site before they would turn it on. They said I was using the site as an archive even though all of the pictures could be accessed from the web site just like the picture galleries and forums they offered.
The only other solution they offered was to move my site to a significantly more expensive tier of service that uses a hypervisor to run multiple copies of the operating system on the server one for each user. The hypervisor partitions the hardware and your site performance is limited by the amount of hardware you lease. They told me that if the amount of traffic gets high enough this kind of service will slow down the end user based on the hardware allocation. Eventually, one would need to lease a private server if you wanted reasonable performance with high traffic.
I would like to see Habitat-Talk become the de facto place to go for sharing QDM information. John assures me that he is committed to supporting this site and growing it as needed to become just that without advertising. The QDMA budget for their web was in the 10s of thousands per year. That included there entire web site as well as forums but it gives you an idea of how expensive it is to operate a high traffic site.
I would like to keep John's cost down and the performance of this forum up as long as possible before he must upgrade. To that end the more picture and videos that are posted to places like photobucket, imgr, youtube, etc. and then linked to this site, the better.
Thanks,
Jack