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video streaming shopping cart

Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 11:46 pm
by dexxa
hello, there. i need to build a php shopping cart with a video streaming feature. people can buy 2 minutes long videos on the site and after they have bought the video they can view the video. is there any shopping cart out there that has this feature? thank you. :) BTW i am not writing a porno site in case you are wondering.

Re: video streaming shopping cart

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 8:53 am
by ghurtado
Most shopping carts I have seen will allow you to have "digital assets" (like your videos) that you can sell just as well as the physical ones. In fact, in many ways this is easier to handle, since there is no shipping or tracking of packages, etc...

Re: video streaming shopping cart

Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 8:01 pm
by The_Anomaly
ghurtado wrote:Most shopping carts I have seen will allow you to have "digital assets" (like your videos) that you can sell just as well as the physical ones. In fact, in many ways this is easier to handle, since there is no shipping or tracking of packages, etc...
This is what I was initially thinking as well. Then they could download the videos in whatever format you like.

FWIW, I've been working with ffmpeg a lot to convert videos into FLV format, and then play them from an flv player on the site. If you were to insist on streaming from the site, and didn't care all that much about quality, I'd highly recommend using the FLV format (like youtube) to stream them. Just in terms of cross compatibility with different browsers, set ups, operating systems, etc. Nothing more irritating then trying to get an embedded WMV video to play.

Re: video streaming shopping cart

Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 8:20 pm
by omniuni
Oh, gosh! WMV? The horror!

I would say that for what you're looking for, you should not have too much difficulty. You need only get the charge, anyways, and flag their account for being able to view a particular video, after which they can do what they want with it.

As for formats, avoid that horrid abomination of Microsoft anyway. WMV achieves compression by, among other things, noting differences between frames. As a side effect, if you fast forward or rewind, it can take several seconds before it is able to reconstruct the entire image, during which you see a rather muddy botch of your video.

Stream video in FLV format, which provides excellent compression, and very decent quality, without the bad side effects of WMV. FlowPlayer is a great Open Source Flash video player with lots of options, and it's really easy to integrate.

For downloads, MPEG is probably your surest bet, although OGG Theora is also great. Theora is an Open format, that has codecs easily available for all platforms, and since they're Open as well, you can offer them for download. Theora has great compression, and very good quality as well. Since sound is compressed as OGG Vorbis, instead of MP3 as it is in an MPEG, you're also guaranteed good sound quality. MPEG, of course, is just a well supported standard, and everyone should be able to play an MPEG without a problem, although you'll need to stick to the older MPEG2, and not the newer MPEG4 format for maximal compatibility. Neither MPEG, nor Theora suffer from WMV's diffing problems. MPEG, Theora, and even FLV work just fine in media players like VLC, MPUI (MPlayer), and any Xine derivative.

Oh, BTW ZenCart, which I link to below, is a pretty cool project, and it lists on it's features page "downloadable virtual products", which, I believe, is exactly what you're looking for.

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_ ... pages_id=5

Hope some of that helps,
OmniUni