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video online

Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 9:07 pm
by ruth
Hi everyone,
A school has asked me to put their education videos online for students and teachers to play. The video formats are in avi or mpg. The videos are 15 to 60 minutes long. I have never done any thing with video before, so I have little idea what is a good way and how to play a video online. They also have a couple of requirements that I am not sure if it is possible to do it:
1. They want to track how many times a user plays a particular video. (Each user will login to play.)
2. There are several chapters in one video. They would like to have a list of chapters, and jump from chapter to chapter to play the video. I have no idea how this can be done. Is that possible to do this using a web based application?

I am not sure if this is a right place to ask this question. I have been searching on the internet, but could not find good answers. I would appreciate if someone in this forum could help me or point me to some readings or tutorials.

Thank you very much in advance.

Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 11:06 pm
by hongco
yes,it can be done on web-based application. one way you can do is to PHP and MySQL. A database to keep info of videos, chapters, and user info. Does each student need to have separate account to log in? or they all can use the same account?

Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 11:28 pm
by ruth
Thanks, hongco. Each student will have their own account to log in. I may record how many times they log in. But I don't know how to record how many times they play a particular video. I guess once they click on a link to start playing, I lost all control. Is there a way I can still track what they do after the video starts?

How do I start playing a chapter while all chapters are in one file?

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 1:41 am
by hongco
hello ruth,

if you are planning to use database, I'd suggest you would have something like this:

3 tables with properties as the flowings:

- videos: id(primary key), videoname
- chapters: id(primary key), video_id, chaptername, views
- users: id(primary key), username, password

I skipped most the part, and go to the part where you can increase the view numbers of each video:

let say you have a link to 1 video:
http://www.myschoo.com/video/view.php?id=3

this id=3 is for the chapter -> from here you can get the rite info such as:
- which videos this chapter belongs to: get its name
- get the name of the video
--> be able to locate the file name:
--> if the info found, get some html code to display the video:
- with the given id=3, you will then update the table chapters with views incremented by 1 where id=3.
- if you need to find out how many video/chapters each user watched, the data tables will be different a bit

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 4:22 am
by hame22
think about using windows media to stream the video, using asx files you can create playlists of a number of videos. Then all you have to do is onload of this file add one to a field in the database that stores the number of times the file is accessed

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 4:44 am
by hongco
it is not as simple as it may sound as the poster stated that there should be a log on how many time each student gets logged in, how many the video is watched. More data saved will give better statistic results if the school wants to have. That is the reason why they want to keep track of the students watching those video.

Beside, each file is about 1 hour, having playlist not gonna do any good. Students always get bored after watching for about 20 min... I doubt they show good movies :)

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 6:51 pm
by ruth
Thanks everyone for your replies. My main problem now is that I don't know how to make a link so that it can start a chapter directly as all chapters are in only one file. Do I split the file chapter by chapter manually? Is there an easy way to identify the chapters within the application? They have about 100 videos, and each has several chapters.

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 9:06 pm
by hongco
i am not sure if we can start reading by byte ranges....Another you can do is to find some software which can slice the movie into smaller ones. I've seen people doing that but i do not know wht they had used.

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 9:23 pm
by hongco
i searched and found this:

http://www.tomdownload.com/multimedia_d ... _slice.htm

you may want to read more and see if you can use it.
It is easier to split the movie to each chapters for your purpose.

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:26 pm
by ruth
Thank you so much for all your help, hongco. That is what I need.

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:54 pm
by hongco
you're welcome. goodluck on the project