Page 1 of 1

PHP Website Possibility with Dynamic Video?

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 2:17 pm
by akphidelt
Hi there, this is my first message so a little bit about me. I'm a financial analyst, I'm not a professional programmer but what I do is use different types of financial software to build databases for fellow employees that are located in remote sites. During this process I have gathered around 800 short video clips describing these databases. Each time I create a database I add a folder with screen capture clips describing the database so I do not need to fly to these locations and demonstrate it in front of them.

My question is that I want to create a website that shows these video tutorials. I was wondering what is the cheapest method to do this and is there any books or great tutorial sites on how to manage videos on the webpage.

Also, I was wondering if PHP could be used with a MySql database that stores these videos with tags. So if someone searches for a certain type of video, the PHP code would show all videos that matched that description.

I realize this will be a long process, so I'm willing to take any advice on where to start to possibly understand how to do this myself. I understand enough of PHP to talk with MySql and get information out of it... but I do not after hours of searching know how to possibly add 1000 videos to a website that doesn't take up too much space and cost $1000 a month.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

Akphidelt

Re: PHP Website Possibility with Dynamic Video?

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 4:02 pm
by Christopher
It is certainly possible to you what you want. I would not store the videos themselves in the database, but only the information about then and the file name. Most hosting plans provide a lot of disk space, but limit bandwidth. So depending on the size of the videos, disk space may not be the problem. The number of users will.

Re: PHP Website Possibility with Dynamic Video?

Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 4:30 pm
by akphidelt
Alright, so that's good news, because if the number of users increase you can always increase bandwidth right?

Also, if it is possible... what is the first step of going about it. For example I have

80 1 to 8 minute videos describing in detail a cost reporting database that uses Excel/Access/Oracle to create custom reports based off time entries.

Each video is saved in .avi format. I'm pretty sure the first step would be to get some software to compress it to .flv?

Then what would be the next step. What is the easiest and most space-friendly way to attach them to the website?

Any help would be awesome.
Thanks for the reply!