How many of you stream video from your site?
-
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Would that it were as easy as serving up mp3 files...
Yes and no! If you just put mp3/mpeg files, the player (may be not all but most) will first download the file entirely and then play it. If you use a streaming server, the video will be streamed in portions. So if your video is pretty short that download approach will work.
And of course, everyone wants a streaming experience, not waiting for a download to then run external from the browser. Thus, finding the right player coupled with the right codec / file format is the secret sauce. As you noted. H.264 is popular, but what player do you use that's portable across Apple, Windows, Android, etc.?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
:laugh: Someone once told me I was a good guitarist ... as good as Stevie Ray Vaughn (I'm not by the way). My response: "If I were as good as SRV I wouldn't be standing here talking to you I'd be snorting cocaine off of a groupie's ass in Austin right now!" She wasn't impressed. ;) As far as video goes, I tried serving a few large-ish MPGs off of my own site and at one point I had 50 people connected and downloading the same file at the same time. It pretty much brought the small hosting company that had my site to it's knees. Video is tough. It's hard to make it look good and even harder to serve it reliably. Vimeo[^] might be a better option than Youtube. Their videos seems to have better quality.
Girls are like that. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
And of course, everyone wants a streaming experience, not waiting for a download to then run external from the browser. Thus, finding the right player coupled with the right codec / file format is the secret sauce. As you noted. H.264 is popular, but what player do you use that's portable across Apple, Windows, Android, etc.?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesHere is what you need to do: 1. For desktop browsers (IE, FF, Chrome etc), embed a flash player and use that to play the video. 2. For Mobile browsers use the video HTML element.
-
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
Just make sure you encode it with a codec everyone has.
And that would be?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesMany sites (TED, OpenUniversity, etc.) offer their videos as downloads in
WMVandmp4formats. I think that would safely cover the lot. /raviMy new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
-
Many sites (TED, OpenUniversity, etc.) offer their videos as downloads in
WMVandmp4formats. I think that would safely cover the lot. /raviMy new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
For downloads that would certainly be safe. It's the real time streaming that I find more challenging in terms of a single, portable solution.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Here is what you need to do: 1. For desktop browsers (IE, FF, Chrome etc), embed a flash player and use that to play the video. 2. For Mobile browsers use the video HTML element.
With the current site redesign I'm in the middle of, I'm maintaining two separate paths and UIs for desktop and mobile so as to optimize the latter. The HTML video element is specific to HTML 5, isn't it? But then, if I'm targeting Apple and Android (maybe MS if they every arrive), that's probably acceptable. Blackberry is a lost cause as far as video goes, so I'm not really worried about them. By the way, with all this "we hate flash" stuff going on at Apple, does that just apply to their mobile devices? In other words, if someone is running Safari on a Mac, does it support Flash?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
By this I mean actually hosting and serving video from your web site rather than linking to youtube, et al. While there are times when youtube poses a great advantage as they eat the storage and bandwidth, there are other times when you want complete control to serve things up natively without involving a third party. That said, seems to me that it's yet another prairie on the wild, wild west out there for those who wish to roll their own. You can wrap your video in a Flash player, which is great. Until you want someone on an Apple to view it. And I'm sure there are various other little compatibility adventures as well, particularly if you want to support a good mobile experience on, at minimum, Android, Windows and Apple devices. And of course, I do. Are there cross platform players out there that you can bolt onto your site that handle compatibility issues for you as well as providing other niceties such as full screen mode? Or do you guys just get down and dirty and write something clever, and terribly portable, yourself? Would that it were as easy as serving up mp3 files...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesCreating more than one version of a video can be troublesome, and a pain, yet, with HTML5 you can let the browser, including those for the modern mobile phones, best choose the format it best understands whilst also falling back to flash for older browsers that do not understand many, if any, of those HTML5/CSS3 tags etc. http://html5tutorial.net/tutorials[^] http://net.tutsplus.com/?s=HTML5[^]
-
With the current site redesign I'm in the middle of, I'm maintaining two separate paths and UIs for desktop and mobile so as to optimize the latter. The HTML video element is specific to HTML 5, isn't it? But then, if I'm targeting Apple and Android (maybe MS if they every arrive), that's probably acceptable. Blackberry is a lost cause as far as video goes, so I'm not really worried about them. By the way, with all this "we hate flash" stuff going on at Apple, does that just apply to their mobile devices? In other words, if someone is running Safari on a Mac, does it support Flash?
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
In other words, if someone is running Safari on a Mac, does it support Flash?
Yes!
-
By this I mean actually hosting and serving video from your web site rather than linking to youtube, et al. While there are times when youtube poses a great advantage as they eat the storage and bandwidth, there are other times when you want complete control to serve things up natively without involving a third party. That said, seems to me that it's yet another prairie on the wild, wild west out there for those who wish to roll their own. You can wrap your video in a Flash player, which is great. Until you want someone on an Apple to view it. And I'm sure there are various other little compatibility adventures as well, particularly if you want to support a good mobile experience on, at minimum, Android, Windows and Apple devices. And of course, I do. Are there cross platform players out there that you can bolt onto your site that handle compatibility issues for you as well as providing other niceties such as full screen mode? Or do you guys just get down and dirty and write something clever, and terribly portable, yourself? Would that it were as easy as serving up mp3 files...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesI have no experience of this area, even less than yourself judging from your input in the thread, but I also think that you need to consider your market. It's all very well for those with new fangled multi-core processors and Apple iThingies but what about Joe Blow, still running XP on an old Athlon. There are still a lot out there. Can they for instance run H264, or whatever it's called?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
-
Dude, if I knew what I was doing in life, I'd be rich, retired, dating a supermodel and laughing at the rest of you from the sidelines. :-D
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesChristopher Duncan wrote:
I'd be rich, retired, dating a supermodel and laughing at the rest of you from the sidelines
You mean you're NOT?!?! I'm ... I'm ... soooo disillusioned right now. ;P
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL -
:laugh: Someone once told me I was a good guitarist ... as good as Stevie Ray Vaughn (I'm not by the way). My response: "If I were as good as SRV I wouldn't be standing here talking to you I'd be snorting cocaine off of a groupie's ass in Austin right now!" She wasn't impressed. ;) As far as video goes, I tried serving a few large-ish MPGs off of my own site and at one point I had 50 people connected and downloading the same file at the same time. It pretty much brought the small hosting company that had my site to it's knees. Video is tough. It's hard to make it look good and even harder to serve it reliably. Vimeo[^] might be a better option than Youtube. Their videos seems to have better quality.
Joe Simes wrote:
off of a groupie's ass
There's the glitch. You (a) told her "you are a groupie, i.e. someone who'd swoon at me farting in your general direction", and (b) "I'd prefer another groupie anyway, your ass sucks." Corrected response: "If I were as good as SRV we wouldn't be standing here talking to you - I'd be snorting cocaine off of a groupie's your ass in Austin right now!" Also, you might want to replace the town with one that doesn't sound like "hicks central" - though I'm not entirely sure if there's a positive SRV/Austin connection.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy -
Christopher Duncan wrote:
I'd be rich, retired, dating a supermodel and laughing at the rest of you from the sidelines
You mean you're NOT?!?! I'm ... I'm ... soooo disillusioned right now. ;P
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLThe day is still young. :)
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
Creating more than one version of a video can be troublesome, and a pain, yet, with HTML5 you can let the browser, including those for the modern mobile phones, best choose the format it best understands whilst also falling back to flash for older browsers that do not understand many, if any, of those HTML5/CSS3 tags etc. http://html5tutorial.net/tutorials[^] http://net.tutsplus.com/?s=HTML5[^]
May be the way to go. I wonder if this is the route that youtube takes with their player.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
May be the way to go. I wonder if this is the route that youtube takes with their player.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesMy understanding is that YouTube will be offering HTML5 compatible video format(s). As far as hosting, YouTube is not the only place you could consider for hosting what could be huge quantities of video's in competing versions. You could, for example, consider blip.tv, here are their FAQ's http://blip.tv/faq[^]
-
Joe Simes wrote:
off of a groupie's ass
There's the glitch. You (a) told her "you are a groupie, i.e. someone who'd swoon at me farting in your general direction", and (b) "I'd prefer another groupie anyway, your ass sucks." Corrected response: "If I were as good as SRV we wouldn't be standing here talking to you - I'd be snorting cocaine off of a groupie's your ass in Austin right now!" Also, you might want to replace the town with one that doesn't sound like "hicks central" - though I'm not entirely sure if there's a positive SRV/Austin connection.
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy -
By this I mean actually hosting and serving video from your web site rather than linking to youtube, et al. While there are times when youtube poses a great advantage as they eat the storage and bandwidth, there are other times when you want complete control to serve things up natively without involving a third party. That said, seems to me that it's yet another prairie on the wild, wild west out there for those who wish to roll their own. You can wrap your video in a Flash player, which is great. Until you want someone on an Apple to view it. And I'm sure there are various other little compatibility adventures as well, particularly if you want to support a good mobile experience on, at minimum, Android, Windows and Apple devices. And of course, I do. Are there cross platform players out there that you can bolt onto your site that handle compatibility issues for you as well as providing other niceties such as full screen mode? Or do you guys just get down and dirty and write something clever, and terribly portable, yourself? Would that it were as easy as serving up mp3 files...
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting ServicesWhenever I've streamed video I've encoded it as flash and used a flash player. That avoids the inevitable CODEC hassles. You could detect HTML 5 and support an alternative H.264 stream if the browser supports it instead. That's the approach I would take. That should cover most platforms. Cheers, Drew.
-
I have no experience of this area, even less than yourself judging from your input in the thread, but I also think that you need to consider your market. It's all very well for those with new fangled multi-core processors and Apple iThingies but what about Joe Blow, still running XP on an old Athlon. There are still a lot out there. Can they for instance run H264, or whatever it's called?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
-
I have no experience of this area, even less than yourself judging from your input in the thread, but I also think that you need to consider your market. It's all very well for those with new fangled multi-core processors and Apple iThingies but what about Joe Blow, still running XP on an old Athlon. There are still a lot out there. Can they for instance run H264, or whatever it's called?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
If they can run flash, and upgrade it then almost certainly yes. Hell even older version of flash from a number of years ago (say probably 2006?) could handle h264 encoded video.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
-
My understanding is that YouTube will be offering HTML5 compatible video format(s). As far as hosting, YouTube is not the only place you could consider for hosting what could be huge quantities of video's in competing versions. You could, for example, consider blip.tv, here are their FAQ's http://blip.tv/faq[^]
Yeah, I just bumped into them last night as Mail Chimp uses them. Looks like a decent site.
Christopher Duncan
www.PracticalUSA.com
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes
Copywriting Services -
I never could play the ladies as well as I could play the guitar! :| SRV is from Austin Tejas hence the reference. "On the road" would have work equally as well ... not well bad? :doh:
With my track record, I should be legally prohibited from giving dating advice ;)
Agh! Reality! My Archnemesis![^]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy