Hosting Flash Videos Like Youtube

Hi All,

I'm not very familiar with web design and hosting etc so I'm looking for some information on this topic. I want to create a website where I will upload educational videos and stream them like in youtube. What are the technical requirements to do this?

I've asked some of the hosting services and they said for shared hosting, they dont support ffmpeg. Is this going to be an issue? Will I have to use VDS?

Thanks in advance
Jeremy

 

IMHO I would strongly advise against using a web server for movie file conversion, as it will create a strain on cpu, memory and storage which will either send your site to a crawl or trip hosting limits (which temporaily suspend your hosting account).

Is there any reason why you do not want to use youtube (and then link/embed the youtube videos into your website) ?

Another option is to use a desktop tool to covert the files to flash (flv) and then upload to your hosting and link/embed.

In both cases there are many open source CMS, that have modules that allow the easy adding of flash files and/or youtube specifically.

Cheers, Nick

 

If you doing heavy streaming. ie. lots of videos and heavy traffic you can ask for media hosting but this is extra cost. Try it on standard hosting it usually fine.

Best to keep file size small as possible but maintain quality so use WMV. All video files can be converted. You can play around and size, encode a media video and stream it to the bandwidth of your broadband so it plays back smooth. Keep the video window around 320x240 and set the bitrate so it looks ok but the file size isn't huge and no more than 80% of your bandwidth.

Download MS WMV encoder 9 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx



To embed WMV

To embed Flash

Change the 320 and 240 to the resolution accordingly and change the embed lines so they point to your media.

 

At the start we should just be pre-recording and converting into the appropriate format locally and then uploading so that shouldnt be an issue.

I didn't think of that. I do like having control over the process and being able to keep it all self contained. That is probably I didnt even consider using youtube in that way. I think the main concern is to keep users on our site as opposed to having them comment on youtube.

What do you think?

That is the model I'm thinking of. However some of the webhosts are saying that we need to have a ffmpeg library and that is not activated on their shared hosting. I dont quite understand how it works. Do they mean that if I want to have users upload their videos and the server convert, then I need the libraries (and will also run into the server limits problems you were alluding to)?

If I'm converting to flv or wmv locally, do I still need the libraries?

If I'm converting locally and uploading either as flash or wmv, then embed as you suggest, what will the end result look like? Also even after I've converted, do I need code to make the flv/wmv file play in player like the youtube 1?

Thanks in advance
Jeremy

 

huangker
it straight forward. i forget libraries as you new to it all anyways. it is not necessary to use libraries. flv is another option. type wmv vs flv into google to see the pro and cons for both.

at the start...

find out your max download speed
decide on video resolution
encode videos at 80% bitrate of bandwidth.
upload them all into a folder(s) on the ftp.
if video poor quality lower resolution until satisfactory.

i already posted the code to embed so it streams from inside the webpage. it will center the video and display window media player controls underneath the video. if you dont want the controls you put 'false' in the code instead of true and same if you don't want to make it play straightaway when they load the website or press play and also for loop repeat.

iwith showcontrols as true it look like..

250x165 ignore quality it just to illustrate what i'm on about.