Streamed Video recommendations?

Terra · 27th June 2008, 04:17 PM

What would be the simplest way to have a video on a website? I'm aware of YouTube and StreamZilla .. any experiences, tips and horror stories? We're talking about 1 movie here for 1 website on a shared server, so needn't be industrial-strength

PS: file format is likely to be MPG

Tips welcome!

Tim · 27th June 2008, 05:09 PM

We use YouTube to display videos of certain products on an e-commerce site. Works very well and definitely brings in more orders.

But I'm not that happy about the quality - not the quality of YouTube, but the quality of my home-made videos once they've been compressed. We'll be looking at something more professional in the future but it will have to do for now.

One thing I definitely do like about YouTube is that it adds another outpost on the web for our products to be found.

percepts · 27th June 2008, 06:00 PM

I did one using youtube Making RIB Collars

The reason I used youtube was it gives you a fair amount of additional hits depending on what its about but mostly because of bandwidth. The video on the above link had to be split into three because it was too big for one movie(about 25minutes). Had I put it on UH servers it would have blown the customers bandwidth very quickly.

But youtube reduces the quality when it processes the movie so they don't look very good. If you only have a two or three minute movie, then generate your own flv file from flash and play it back through flash player. A 3 minute movie is not so bad on bandwidth if you don't go for best quality. If the customer wants it, then you explain the quality verses cost options and they either get youtube with its advertising and links for cheap price or they get quality plus additional bandwidth costs.

Note that youtube does not use streaming. It always downloads the whole file so if the viewer is looking at the movie for long enough, then all of it downloads. Approx 25MB for 8 minute movie. Varies depending on movie content.

Alex. · 27th June 2008, 06:10 PM

I've not used video upload services, but I found a really interesting one the other day: Vimeo, Video Sharing For You . It allows you to upload and share your videos in HD, which is pretty cool

percepts · 27th June 2008, 06:50 PM

And that 25MB for an 8 minute movie is for youtube reduced quality size.
befor I sent them to youtube they were each 90MB mpg files.
So unless you apply some tight controls you will be using huge bandwidth for video streaming. A 60 minute program streamed from BBC IPlayer is approx 300MB.
So thats about 5MB a minute. i.e. you must get your frame rates and compression done well to get reasonable quality and file sizes.

And read the small print very carefully in any third party site you use for hosting video because whilst they all seem to offer unlimited amounts of bandwidth, it is not for streaming video.

Terra · 30th June 2008, 08:22 AM

Hi guys - many thanks for the tips! Much appreciated.

iraklis · 30th June 2008, 11:54 AM

Since you only need it for 1 file almost every video host will do. I`d skip youtube because of the quality. Check also blip.tv and divshare.com