Best way to display large videos?

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Citizen
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Best way to display large videos?

Post by Citizen »

I have a few 150 meg videos that I want to display on a website. What is the best way to show them? What code should I use to display them? Are there any ways to save bandwidth?

Will it really use 1 gig of bandwidth for every 10 shows?
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pickle
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by pickle »

Yep. Unless you zip it & force a download.
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Citizen
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Citizen »

Whats the best way to show them on the page?

Flash? Quicktime? Embed tag?
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shiznatix
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by shiznatix »

I am not sure how it is done, but I suppose you could transform them into flash like youtube does. It degrades quality but it makes things much easier for the watcher and server. And if the person wants better quality, have a zipped file for download so you save on bandwidth like pickle said.
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Christopher
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Christopher »

When you say "150 meg videos", what format, resolution and compression is used?
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Citizen
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Citizen »

128 kb/s, 150 megs each, about 20-40 mins in duration, all in .avi format
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Christopher
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Christopher »

That is already well compressed. You probably want to stream the videos. Does your host have a streaming option? They will obviously use lots of bandwidth, so you might want to find a host that provides cheap streaming.
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Citizen
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Citizen »

Ya, b/w isnt an issue. I have a 20/mb/s unmetered connection from theplanet dedicated hosting.

Is it true that with any video format other than .flv the entire video has to download first before the video can play? Are there any other options?
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Christopher
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Christopher »

As I said, look into streaming servers.
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Kieran Huggins
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Kieran Huggins »

I'd have to put a vote in for flash video - it's no bad if you roll your own.

You transcode the video from AVI to FLV, then include a flash player on your page. I've done it a few times with great results.

There are a multitude of tutorials on the 'net that spell out the specific software / methods, and there are free versions of everything you need if you dig past page 1 on Google.
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Christopher
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Christopher »

There is even PHP based FLV streaming servers around:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ph ... tnG=Search
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Jonah Bron
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Re: Best way to display large videos?

Post by Jonah Bron »

Go flash. Flash 8 Professional came with a video encoder (turn videos into flash)
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