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Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 1:09 pm
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?

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 5:06 pm
by pickle
Yep. Unless you zip it & force a download.

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 1:09 pm
by Citizen
Whats the best way to show them on the page?

Flash? Quicktime? Embed tag?

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 2:08 pm
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.

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 3:01 pm
by Christopher
When you say "150 meg videos", what format, resolution and compression is used?

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 3:51 pm
by Citizen
128 kb/s, 150 megs each, about 20-40 mins in duration, all in .avi format

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 4:28 pm
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.

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 12:31 pm
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?

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:53 pm
by Christopher
As I said, look into streaming servers.

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 8:55 pm
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.

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 9:21 pm
by Christopher
There is even PHP based FLV streaming servers around:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ph ... tnG=Search

Re: Best way to display large videos?

Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 11:40 am
by Jonah Bron
Go flash. Flash 8 Professional came with a video encoder (turn videos into flash)