Embedding video clips on website
 

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, mods please move if required :)

I am trying to put up some small video clips ( <2-3mb ) on my site.
What would be an ideal way of letting my members access it ?
I was thinking of embedding it on pages ( as opposed to a direct download ).
Bandwidth/space is not an issue.

Also for embedding video clips, what do i need to get it to work on a normal non-vb based page with a custom template and require global.php statement ?
Is there a way to still download the clip directly in such a situation ?

Would love to hear more opinions on this, thanks :)

I have always found a link to be the best option. Your lowband users will be thankful if you do not embed video on the page, very grateful if this video is on the page with other content like images or text.

In the end I think direct downloads will save you bandwidth. Take this for example, a user loads the video via his browser and when done watching it he leaves the page. 4 days later his friend comes over and they want to watch it, catch is his browser cache no longer holds the video, so he has to request it from your server again.

The browsers cache dumps itself all the time, so you can't really know how long data will stay in it. By just sending them to the direct download they will have the entire file on their hard-drive, and are less likely to delete it as soon as the browsers cache clears.

Also embeding the video into your webpage means its displayed in the browser, I don't know about you but I find that very anoying, I would much rather watch video in my prefered program and codecs.

Hmm good points Brad, I may just go with what you mentioned.
Actually I was thinking of hoping this can drive up traffic too, since the visitor will need to come back to the site to view the clip.
But like you mentioned, has its cons too.

Thanks for your thoughts :)

If you have the bandwidth to support it you might want to give it a try. I would still offer a download link to us less able to handle large files. 2mb is very large for browsing in 56k, and when you consider most of the nation see's something closer to 14k - 24k connection rates it just gets worse.

Most of dial-up america is outside of places with good copper, broadband dos'nt exist and the dial-up is way below par compared to some of the bigger citys. There is still a large number of these users around, and they are'nt going away for some time unless we get a real nation wide solution to the bandwidth problem.

I know you probbly serve the world and not just the U.S.A but I wanted to mention it because we are so behind the rest of the world in broadband deployment. Granted most nations are smaller then ours and have more people per sqaure mile but still, alot of us american's are stuck on dial-up and like I said before there are a large number of us still around.

I know the same holds true in canada aswell, so its not just here.

If you want to embed media on pages I suggest reading Windows Meadia Player SDK from microsoft.com, it's the best SDK for embeding media, it even lets you make your own player in a HTML page with full control. I've used it for my jukebox

Thanks guys, you've both been very helpful :)

the #1 thing i wouldn't use is windows media player. you going to not allow any Mac users to watch your video?

just use quicktime, best thing and basically everyone has it.

if you still want to use embedding that is

it's not true with the "everyone has it", you can count Mac and Windows users, I don't think the number on Mac is bigger

Windows Media Player does have an OS X version. I wouldn't recommend encoding it to Windows Media, though (there's a difference).

Hardly any of my friends have it on their computer, it's not as widespread as one may think :)

everyone i know has it and how many downloads does it have i can't remember but it is in the hundreds of millions.

also quicktime 7 supports H.264 codec so go with the best

and filbut1 i do not know a single person that has WMP on OS X, i wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole

but does QuickTime can play .wmv, .wma, .asf, .asx, .avi , .midi.... that WMP supports ?

The truth is I use QT for playing .mov only

remember H.264 is the best codec out there and AAC owns at audio

i have it play .avi and .midi

and .wmv and .wma don't work on OS X anyways, and i wouldn't touch .asf or .asx

for all other file formats i use VLC anyways

I wouldn't either. I'm just saying it exists.

Remember, MPEG will play on virtually any player on any platform--and when compressed to a Video CD format, it can be 1 MB/minute and still look good at 352 x 240 at ~30 FPS. Also remember that AVIs are not a standard format but just the extension for a file that can be one of any hundreds of codecs for both audio and video.
No, no, no, no, depends, yes (and it often sounds far better than WiMP).

also the wmv3 codec and some wma codec doesn't work AT ALL on OS X even in WMP it doesn't work. i believe but even if it did (which i don't 100% know) i don't allow anything windows like on my computer

This argument is one more reason to keep them has direct download. If the person dos'nt have the player you support he is told to download it, a lot of people just leave the site at this point, unless they really want to see the movie.

By letting them download the file the user can watch the movie in the player he wants. Many of the codec's are supported in both quicktime and WMP if you have the proper codec's installed.

Right but this cannot be applied for Streamloading, you must have understood the purpose of streamloading, with WMP I got the best player for streamload.

I decided to go the route of a video thumb, clip description, format and size, and finally a downloable link to the clip in the end :D

However I think i will have to start re-encoding the clips...most are in WMV.....
And for those talking about the Mac issue....i am with you on that...I used to work extensively on a Mac and anything by MS on a Mac is just plain crappy.

How would you suggest doing your method and makeing video thumbs etc.?
I want to upload to the server and have it to where people can only download the vid.Is there a way to restrict a user group to where they can download the file only once and when they do it restricts any further download of that particular file?