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 :)