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Online web streaming is one of the most popular Internet activities. Whether you want to watch video from across the world, news recaps, TV shows, tutorials, or funny videos, you're guaranteed to find something you like at one of the top five video streaming websites.

1. Youtube.com

The most popular video streaming website, YouTube has thousands of videos on nearly every topic imaginable, all user submitted and free to watch. The videos are currently offered in widescreen format, though most videos upload retain the original 4:3 aspect ratio. In addition to widescreen, videos can now be uploaded and viewed in high quality.

Videos on Youtube are often short homemade movies, but many record labels are now releasing low-quality versions of their most popular music videos on the website. If you're looking for a recap of the latest sports game, news cast, or speech, Youtube is your best option.

Pros: Youtube offers 16:9 aspect ratio, high quality video playback, support for nearly every video format, a large audience for your videos, the ability to embed videos on a blog or website, video reply feature, customizable personal video page, the ability to limit video access.

Cons: While the website is wildly popular, it does have a few problems. There is an excess of spam comments, a video limit of 100MB, and only standard-quality videos can be embedded on blogs or websites.

2. Vimeo.com

Vimeo is a sophisticated, free video sharing website. Basic users are allowed to upload up to 500MB of video content per week, or pay for an account to upload more. Vimeo attracts a wide array of video artists, and is often used to upload short movies, skits, and portfolios. The website supports full HD streaming and widescreen format, as well as a wide array of video codec support, making it the ideal location to watch and share high-quality and HD personal videos.

Pros: Vimeo has an easy-to-navigate interface, the ability to create and moderate video groups, high definition video support, up to 1GB video uploads for premium accounts, community forums, and an artistic user base.

Cons: Because Vimeo is so frequently used to upload large movie files, it can take over an hour to convert a single video.

3. Metacafe.com

Metacafe rocketed to popularity with their page view money earning system. Many videos on the website are duplicates from YouTube, but in addition to that content, there is a wide array of video tutorials on many subjects, including DIY hacks, magic, and science experiments. If you're interested in making money off your video's page views, Metacafe is the ideal website to use.

Pros: Metacafe has a popular pageview payment system, which allows users to be compensated for their videos. In addition, videos can be downloaded with a link under the video or embedded on blogs or websites. The website has many high-quality tutorials.

Cons: Metacafe increased it's video resolution, and many of the videos are now pixelated due to up-sampling. Many videos are clones from Youtube.

4. Hulu.com

The first website to legally offer a wide array of free TV shows, Hulu was founded by NBC and offers dozens of free TV series, both current and off-air broadcasts. Some of the TV shows offered includes: The Simpsons, Family Guy, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Bones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Office. Unfortunately, Fox and some other broadcasters have pulled some free shows from the list forcing you to upgrade to a paid version.

In addition to offering TV shows, Hulu also has a catalog of movies available to watch, including such popular shows as: Spy Game, Liar Liar, Ghostbusters, Men in Black, and The Karate Kid.

Pros: Hulu videos can be viewed in 360p for slower Internet connections. Popular clips are available for recent and popular TV shows and movies. New series are available, with new episodes appearing up to a week after aired on cable. The website is completely free. Videos can be purchased and downloaded. A personal queue can be created for favorite content.

Cons: Videos can no longer be embedded in blogs and on websites, high definition video streaming is not available for most videos, and ads are displayed three or more times per video. Website is available to US residents only.

5. Veoh.com

Veoh is a video content website, but has made a name for itself by partnering with different companies to offer TV shows for free. Offering TV shows not available from Hulu, you can watch popular shows such as: The Big Bang Theory, Friends, According to Jim, CSI, and Everwood.

In addition to a large supply of free TV shows, Veoh also offers user submitted content, including animations, home videos, and funny clips.

Pros: Videos stream in higher quality resolution. The original video files can be downloaded and saved to a hard drive for later viewing. User submitted content can be embedded in blogs and websites, shared directly with friends, and saved to a personal favorites list.

Cons: Commercial videos are only available for users located within the US.

More Streaming Site Options

For completeness here's a list I put together of over 40 additional streaming sites. If you can't find something you like here, you are not really trying :>)

ABC.com: ABC, like NBC, now offers a wide array of streaming videos, including full episodes of their most popular TV shows.
Archaeologychannel.com: The Archeology Channel offers hours of free streaming video based on culture, humans, and archeology.
Archive.org: The National Archives streams footage of past events and old documentaries, including space documentaries from the 70's.
BigContact.com: Big Contact allows users to create their own channels, and offers several professional streaming channels for anyone to watch.
Blinkx.com: Boasting over 32 million hours of video footage.
Break.com: This video website is marketed towards men, and has a list of daily video picks on their homepage. The videos are outrageous, funny, and short.
BroadbandSports.com: Sports videos on all types can be found on Broadband Sports, including recaps, highlights, athlete videos, and personal sports videos.
Clipshack.com: This website features sort clips, recaps, and small videos of random content
CollegeHumor.com : Their version of videos focuses mainly on the humorous end and focused toward the college demographic.
Comcast Xfinity: Comcast's fancast has been renamed to Comcast XFinity Videos. This shows a variety of free tv shows along with much content you have to be a subscriber to watch.
Crackle.com: More of an Indy/off beat TV shows and movie website, you can watch webshows and other shows you can't find on TV.
Current.com: Currently in Beta, this website has a wide array of modern video content, and is very similar to YouTube.
Dailymotion.com: Dailymotion is similar to Current TV, and offers a wide range of random video content.
DevilDucky.com: This website features favorite videos grabbed from many different sources and aggregated together. The website contains small videos, TV shows, movie trailers, news recaps, fan videos, and more.
DocumentaryStorm. "DocumentaryStorm is a website dedicated to free full-length documentaries gathered from all over the net. The main objective is to spread knowledge, index the thousands of educational videos on the internet and an all around freedom to investigate human ingenuity". With thanks to anonymous poster Harry for this suggestion :)
Flukiest.com: Flukiest is a social networking website, and has an impression video collection
Ifilm.com: A standard video streaming website.
Megavideo.com: Mega Video is the video streaming service for Megaupload.
Museum.tv: Docufest is an online video archive website with access to theater reenactments, historic video and radio streams, and interviews.
NBC.com: NBC now streams dozens of episodes for free, including Heroes, According to Jim, and the Biggest Loser.
Newgrounds.com: An awesome and high quality website featuring user submitted satire, animation, and humor videos.
Open-Video.org: This website is a 'shared digital video collection', and has lecture, documentary, educational, and historical videos, as well as others, for free streaming.
Ourmedia.org: Our Media lacks a professional site, but has dozens of channels to search.
Phanfare.com: Phanfare is a unique video sharing website, as it is meant to be used with an iPhone, and makes uploading, sharing, and viewing mobile videos easier than ever.
Revver.com: You'll find a wide array of content on Revver, most of it high quality and serious. There video base includes interviews, skits, product reviews, movie reviews, animations, and tutorials
Sevenload.com: Sevenload is a sleek, professional-looking video streaming website with categories such as Music, DIY, Arts, and Politics.
SpeedyTV: User uploaded streaming videos and movies as well as sorted videos from other locations.
Starz Play: Starz Play is offered from Verizon, and allows users to stream hundreds of blockbuster movies and the Starz TV channel for $10 per month.
Stickam.com. Stickam is a twist on the modern video streaming site - you can browse hundreds of live streaming video feeds and interact with the other viewers via a chat box.
StreetFire.net: This website has thousands of videos, most of them dealing with cars in some way
StupidVideos.com - As the name of the website suggests, don't expect to find enlightening videos here. However, if you're looking for some good laughs, there's nowhere better than Stupid Videos.
ThatVideoSite.com: This website pulls the most popular videos from a wide range of websites and lists them all on the homepage for your viewing pleasure.
The News Hour The PBS News Hour. Miss an important news speak, coverage, or documentary? The News Hour has regular updates of free, streaming news coverage.
Trueveo.com: Trueveo streams content from dozens of different sites, including Hulu, Lifetime, and GQ.
TVDuck: Provides links to other internet sources streaming movies and TV shows.
UStream.tv: UStream TV is another live streaming website, allowing users to chat with each other while watching and participating in live video streams.
Videoart.net: This website only has about 2000 videos, but they are all artist in merit - animations, documentaries, galleries, narrative, etc.
VideoBomb.com: The website is a basic, bland video streaming site with random videos.
Videosift.com: Video Sift works very similar to the popular website Digg. Users add videos, and other users 'sift' through them, pushing the good ones to the top, while the poor ones fall to the bottom.
vids.Myspace.com: Myspace TV offers a wide array of video content, including personal videos, vlogs, and TV recaps.

Introduction

All of the PDF writers in this review are programs that function by creating a pseudo printer on your system. When you want to create a PDF document from pretty much any application you just choose to print it to the PDF printer and it creates a PDF document. The thing that distinguishes one product from another is the number of options and flexibility available. The one problem with this approach is that you need to have a program that will open the file on your system. If someone sends you a file created with a program you do not have and you can't open the file then you can't print it and if you can't print it then you can't convert it to a pdf using a pseudo printer technique. The two online products do not suffer from this problem but are limited only by the file formats recognized by the online vendor.

After eliminating those PDF Writers suggested by readers that were not free, were limited time trials, and basically adware (the product was free but forced the user to endure various ads as a punishment for using it), I've selected some best free products in this review. These are Bullzip PDF Printer, PDF24, PDFCreator, doPDF and CutePDF Writer.

Which one of these is best? That really depends on the options you need.

Discussion

Recommending the best product for all users is not always easy due to differing user requirements. For example, most of the recommended writers have many options and while this is a plus for advanced users it is a minus for those who only want a simple PDF writer. Presently, I am most taken withBullZip and PDF24 but all of these programs have their strengths

BullZip is a very strong program that has been time proven to be a top performer. However files created by Bullzip PDF Printer may not be searchable. While it created a searchable pdf from word processing programs it did not from other programs like Excel. All the other candidates produced a searchable document from Excel and other non-word-processing software.

Key features of Bullzip PDF Printer include the ability to:

Password protect your pdf files (only PDFCreator also had this ability)
Use either 40 or 128 bit encryption on the file (only PDFCreator also had this ability)
Add a watermark (PDFCreator had a limited ability to add watermarks)
Append or prepend files (PDFCreator also had this ability)
Choose different levels of output quality (All but CutePDF had this ability)
Add or change metadata (PDFCreator also had this ability)

PDFCreator in its latest version is another strong choice and has all the features of Bullzip with the exception of a 64 bit version and more limited watermark abilities. The help files are available only in English, French and German. However it does have one unique feature among these products. It comes with both a standalone install and a server install. In a company setting this gives you the ability to install the printer driver on a server and make it available to all the workstations on the network without doing an install on each one of them. This may make it a preferred choice in business situations if you don't need the other options that products like Bullzip offer. Version 0.9.8 of PDF Creator did a great job printing a web page to pdf.

doPDF is comparable to TinyPDF in terms of features. It provides a minimal feature set but does have the ability to choose different levels of output quality which the other two do not. I can see no reason not to prefer it over the other two unless you often print graphical documents to pdf.

Among the very basic pdf Writers is CutePDF. This provides only the most minimal functions and creates the pdf file with no options for password, encryption, metadata, or most other optional functions. On the other hand, it is among the smallest of the downloads.

The most commonly asked question by readers has been about the size of the output file. Using a large test file without graphics, doPDF created the smallest files at 1.4 megs, CutePDF and PDFCreator came in at 1.8 megs, and Bullzip came in at 1.9 megabytes. While CutePDF, PDFCreator and Bullzip were larger they were also set at 600 dpi while the other two did not have the ability to change output and appeared to be 300dpi. This was not a sufficient difference in output file size to make it an important factor for deciding on one over the other. However, when a substantial amount of graphics were included doPDF produced a much larger file than the others. CutePDF came in at 3.5 megs (at 300dpi), Bullzip both came in at 7.8 megs (at 600dpi) and doPDF came in at a whopping 13.3 megs (at 600dpi). PDFCreator failed to correctly render the page and created failure errors each time it was tried.

The most requested missing feature in all of these free products is the ability to delete or reorder PDF pages, but you can easily accomplish this task by using some useful tools reviewed in this article Best Free PDF Tools.

Online Solution

Although PrimoPDF was not recommended for the best pdf writer it does have a free online version athttp://online.primopdf.com/ that allows you to upload a file and receive it back as a PDF via email. If you need a pdf conversion only on rare occasion or you are on a computer that does not allow you to install software, or you don't have a program that can read the file, then this is a reasonable option. Of course there is no opportunity to add passwords, encrypt, or add any of the other features you may need. It is just a straight pdf file.

HP also offers a free online service called CloudPrint. It is designed to give you the ability to print from a cell phone or PDA. If you check your email from a cell phone and need to print an attachment you can just send it to this service, which will convert it to a PDF file and send a SMS message to your cell phone with a reference ID. When you get to a computer with an Internet interface you can login to the CloudPrint service and print the document. It will also convert and print pictures taken with your cell phone. While I don't see a need for this service personally, some swear by it, especially those who are constantly on the road seeing clients or between multiple offices. This was not considered as one of the best PDF Writers only because it does not produce a file that you can save and keep as a PDF on your local drive. It converts to PDF on the web server and allows you to print it from there. On the other hand, it does allow you to print documents without having the original program that produced the file.

Other PDF Writers

These are a number of other free PDF writers which were brought up in comments here or noted from other sources. As they are not rated in this review, I am listing them here with brief descriptions and links to their sites for ease of reference.

PrimoPDF, a lag of several seconds from the time I selected the printer until the screen with the Primo interface opened. On my fast computer it worked reasonably well but still much slower than all other products.
NitroPDF Printer has both writer and reader capabilities, supports annotation, text extraction, but full features set only found in the paid version.
PDF Redirect has both writer and reader capabilities, can merge PDFs, offers encryption, multi-language support, no adware, but a full feature set is only available in the paid version.
PDFill PDF and Image Writer, many options and stable. Downloads from Cnet (Download.com) require the use of a proprietary installer. This can install additional components you might not want.
WinPDF Writer is for basic PDF writing, small and simple, requires Ghostscript to install if not available on your computer.
PDF XChange comes in with a tabbed interface and zoom-in feature, supports notes, annotations and export options. It has several restrictions, ads supported and installs the ASK toolbar unless you opt-out during setup.