Hosting your own videos

[ampsonic]

Hello All,

Anyone here host their own videos for website playback? I grew frustrated with YouTubes 10 minute limit, and Vimeo's weekly upload limit, so I have started playing with JW Player and hosting my own h264 files.

So far, I have progressive downloading working, as well as an "HD" on/off switch working. Just need to dial in the compression for the 2 different streams.

www.nickbodmer.com/video

thoughts?

[HankCastello]

I think the only real downsides are -

1] disk space costs money (not much, but hi-def can add up if you have lots of videos)
2] bandwidth costs money (same thing - it's cheap, but can add up)
3] YouTube, etc., can get you additional viewers, especially if you optimize your videos for their search criteria

[DavidPartington]

I started off hosting my own but went to Vimeo for better cross platform compatibility.  However, I'm a little discouraged by Vimeo's streaming at certain times of the day, so had been looking around again myself.

How much work was it to implement the player?

What problems did you run in to?

[HankCastello]

It'll be interesting to see what Nick's experience is with that player.  I tried it about a year and a half ago and it was too buggy to mess with, so I just wrote my own, non-Joomla Flash video player and used the wrapper function to incorporate it into Joomla.  Now, Apple is trying to get us to forego Flash and go with HTML5, which is being handled differently in different browsers.

[DavidPartington]

It'll be interesting to see what Nick's experience is with that player.  I tried it about a year and a half ago and it was too buggy to mess with, so I just wrote my own, non-Joomla Flash video player and used the wrapper function to incorporate it into Joomla.  Now, Apple is trying to get us to forego Flash and go with HTML5, which is being handled differently in different browsers.

...and therein lies the problem with HTML5 at this point.  What support is there for HTML5 in IE6?  Way too many people still using it for comfort.  I just had some agro getting IE6 to render some CSS correctly, and of course the client was running IE6 on all his machines and won't update!

So, with that in mind, I'm holding off too much HTML5 at this point - much as I'd love to embrace it - being an Apple user

[HankCastello]

From both a security standpoint AND a useability standpoint, your client really needs to get with IE8 or Firefox.  Even Microsoft has admitted IE6 is a dangerous failure.   Many of my clients have recently dropped support for IE6 in their websites and I'll bet that's happening a lot.  I mean, it IS two full versions behind and its flaws are widely documented.

[HankCastello]

This version of Internet Explorer is widely derided for its security issues and lack of support for modern web standards, making frequent appearances in "worst tech products of all time" lists, with some publications labeling it as the "least secure software on the planet."

..that quote is from Wikipedia..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6

[ampsonic]

I was suprised at how easy it was to set up the player.

Upload your H264 file to your web server, upload the flash file and a .js file, then use this wizard to create your code:

http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player-setup-wizard

toggle the "HD" option, and you basically just point it to two files, one HD, one not. The hardest part for me has been tweaking the encoding settings trying to find that file size / quality balance.

[HankCastello]

Thanks for the info!

Back to the html5 story...

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/youtube-html5-does-not-yet-meet-all-of-our-needs/8809?tag=nl.e550

..apparently YouTube doesn't like it.

[DavidPartington]

I was suprised at how easy it was to set up the player.

Upload your H264 file to your web server, upload the flash file and a .js file, then use this wizard to create your code:

http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player-setup-wizard

toggle the "HD" option, and you basically just point it to two files, one HD, one not. The hardest part for me has been tweaking the encoding settings trying to find that file size / quality balance.

What bitrate settings did you settle on for 1280x720?

[DavidPartington]

...and any way to auto resize when the user chooses HD?   I'd like the HD to play at 1280x720 instead of the smaller size...?