Video Streaming from vBulletin?

[BadgerDog]

Hello all ?

For the last 10 years, my wife and I have paid for a a not-for-profit vBulletin based board for retired veterans, hosted over the Internet by a typical web site provider?

Many of these veterans send us typical MP4 videos for hosting and sharing with other veterans on the board.

For most of those 10 years, because we didn?t have a very large hosted hard disk (2Gb), we've used the JWPlayer hosting site (used to be the old bits-on-the-run site) for those videos. It comes with a video player we can customize and embed into threads, posts and articles on our site and has worked pretty well. All the videos stream instantly and smoothly, with real time forward and backwards, never halts to load more video etc.. We don?t use a lot of their bandwidth as under our account type, we?re allowed 250GB Streaming/month (we only use 12 GB or just 5% of that) and 100k video plays/month (we average 150 plays or a fraction of that). We need to store currently about 100Gb of videos.

Unfortunately, JWPlayer keeps raising their prices and they now want over $300 U.S. per year, which we can?t afford as we live off donations and our site is provided free for all veterans.

Our host computer was vintage 2005, so last year we spent all our donations and upgraded to a faster hosted computer that came with a 4 terabyte hard disk, so I figured we could move all our videos onto it and using something like SPRUTO (http://spruto.com/) which let?s one create a free front end video player for playing videos, avoid the costs like theJWPlayer site.

So, I copied some MP4 test videos onto our server M, but they don?t run well. They see seem to stream 30 seconds, then halt, load another 30 seconds to play, then halted again.. etc.

I was told that we need to have video server software capability on our own in-house server, to be able to do this properly, which is why all of the hosting sites like Vimeo, YouTube, JWPlayer etc stream so smoothly. Before you ask, we really want to avoid moving all our videos to any of these services and get trapped in the same situation we?re in now.

The question of course?

We have lots of CPU power available to be able to run an uBuntu based video server application, but I?ve never seen one anywhere. Does anyone know how we can meet the mission we need, storing and streaming smoothly all our videos directly from our own 4TB server to our member?s machines, without pauses etc?

Thank you for any advice and feedback .. :up:

Regards,
Doug

[BadgerDog]

Anyone with suggestions?

Thanks..

Regards,
Doug

[Kane@airrifle]

Have a look at http://mediadrop.video/docs/