Web video players

[danbnpp]

Hello

I was wondering if anyone here could help me with an issue I'm having with my web site and video players. So I run a site for my brother's band and on the site I have videos of the shows but the player I'm using take awhile to load the videos and I need them to load faster then 5 to 10 minutes. I won't use youtube because I want these videos to be on the web site only so people have to go to the web site to see the full show. I use dreamweaver for my web editing, yeah I know some of you think it's not good for learning and stuff but I do more coding then the program. I'm currently using magic htlm web video player to do the videos but it takes a while to load, is there something else I can use that would load the videos faster and supports full screen mode?

 

[Phreaddee]

I don't really understand your reasoning for not using YouTube. Not that I'm a big fan of YouTube, I much prefer Vimeo, but both should be able to do what you need...

 

[chrishirst]

and I need them to load faster then 5 to 10 minutes.

Use a streaming format then.

 

[danbnpp]

Phreaddee , it's because I want people to go to my site to view the whole show rather than a song which is posted on you tube. If I put up the 60 minute show on you tube then people wouldn't go to my site to view the videos cause it's all on you tube when my site has info the visitor maybe interested in like when my brother's band is playing next.

So what options do I have for streaming the video? I want to give the visitors some controle and the ability to make the video go full screen.

 

[Phreaddee]

my website has several videos streaming on it. they all come from our vimeo account and are embedded into the site. to the end user, they dont ever need to travel to vimeo to see it. (although if they do then they get to see it there instead) but rather view it as if it was a seamless part of my website.

so your reasoning still doesnt make sense. you can have it on your website and hosted through a video sharing co. like youtube or (preferrably, cos its better) vimeo. this will give you it full screen, streaming and mobile capable.

 

[danbnpp]

Well I want to limit what people will catch on you tube, for instance my brothers band performs a lot of songs in their set list so I'll take a video of a few songs and post them on my npp you tube channel (Nimbus Planet Productions) and I post all the shows which are 45 to an hour long on my site. You can hear the songs seprately on youtube but I want to keep the full show on my site. The full shows are not to be viewed any where else because I want people to go to the site and people won't go there if they can see the videos some where else.
If I can get the videos to load faster while still being viewed from my site nimbusplanetproductions.com then that would make it all good. If there is a service that allows me to keep the videos private in their searches and that will allow me to upload videos that are an hour or more and fb like and share plugins I would use that. Are there ways to stream from my site that would be better? What are the ways to stream videos with out using sites like youtube?

 

[Phreaddee]

on vimeo you can set videos to hidden so they don't appear on your vimeo profile. you can then place the embed from these hidden videos on your website, thus making the website "the only place they can view it" so to speak...

 

[danbnpp]

vimeo is a paid service, their cheapest package wouldn't handle my needs. The videos are 350 megs to over 600 megs in size, my web site is 150 gigs with unlimited band width. Keeping the videos on my site would be the better option right now and I'd rather keep them on the site. I'm sure there is something else besides youtube and other site like it. They have draw backs that I won't bother with, I can't have a limit on storage space, file size, censorship (It's a good way to kill a song), bandwidth, or anything else. As the bands fan base grows more people will be viewing the videos, I kept that in mind when I pain for my site. I just need a faster way to stream the videos with the options I want.

 

[BetterWebsites]

To minimize loading time, cut costs and retain user interest, why not limit each video to a 30 second clip? Then if a user wants to hear more, offer a download link to the full video wrapped in a zip file.

 

[Robert Chambers]

I recently decided to host videos on a website rather than Youtube or Vimeo for reasons I won't go into. After trying various players, I settled on Flowplayer, which works with HTML 5 fairly well. I converted my videos all to .mp4 and .webm (for Firefox). I used MP4 Faststart to move the .mp4 meta data to the front and did not use the <source> tag which seems to slow down loading and used the preload="none" parameter. My videos weren't as long as yours; but they load pretty fast.

 

[danbnpp]

I'll check it out, the other options are not great like vimo. Is the player free? And what options does it give you? Full screen?, Color, size?.

 

[danbnpp]

Ok so I'm checking it out and I have one question about how you got your videos to load faster. So I'm looking at the code they give and I remembered what you said about the source tag. What did you use for the tag if it didn't have source?
Here is the tag they say to use

<div class="flowplayer">   <video>      <source type="video/mp4" src="/path/to/intro.mp4"/>   </video></div>

what did you use if it wasn't this exact code? I'm getting ready to try it out and and at the moment I'm getting the js and css scrips to host on my site instead of rhem being externally linked.

 

[danbnpp]

Ok since you didn't reply and I never got your info that you used I decided to try the mp4 fast start and with out changing code like source my videos are loading faster in Magic html player. Thanks for the advice