Short video display

What should I look for

[henry0]

Some clients on a business news based site would like to allow for a short video (with sound) presentation
possibly 20 to 30 seconds max.

That site is PHP and MySQL driven
however I have no clue on embedding a video and serving it
I admit that I never had any interest on the topic... well, I was wrong :)

any tutorial, how do you do it?
thank you

regards.

[korkus2000]

What kind of media formats does your host provide? Real, windows, Quicktime? If they don't support any I think 20 30 seconds would be ok to download instead of stream. What format do they currently have the video in?

[henry0]

Hello Korkus 2000
I have no problem accessing real audio video and mp3
which is supported by my ISP

so far nothing is created
this is really "from ground zero" project
videos do not exist yet
so I assume the first question is
what will be the video format?
thank you
regard

[kingkelly]

Well t'is good to start of with saving the video format as AVI. High quality, and then you can export that as your desired format.

I would go abouts embedding a windows media file instead of real, just because i hate that stupid real player. You can save as a MOV also (quicktime). That always looks nice displayed on a website...

[henry0]

thanks
so AVI will be the format

I have only access to real audio & video

from there what's the next moves and traps to avoid

will the page loading time be impacted by the embedded video?

regards

[kingkelly]

Ummm, you should put the video on its own blank page, instead of throwing in somewhere on your main page.

As far as turning your AVI into (RAM?), dont know what you use. Come on people, how do you make a real player vid?

[korkus2000]

You can use HELIX PRODUCER [realnetworks.com]. There is a free version (the basic version) to convert and do some basic stuff. I would try this first and see if it does what you need.

[henry0]

Thanks
I'll be on my way

[edit_g]

Flash MX can do some decent stuff with video as well (according to Macromedia). I've never tried it myself but I saw them demo it when they launched MX and it looked pretty impressive - the compression ratio was good too. As I said, I don't know how it works in the practical arena.

[henry0]

Edit_g
I looked at it a couple of months ago
it seems quite promissing although (I might be wrong) I think the $ investement is above Helix paid for version
thanks

[korkus2000]

The spark codec Flash MX uses is awesome. It can handle what you want if you decide to put in the investment. It won't have all the options of real though.

[jamesa]

>>Come on people, how do you make a real player vid?

download Real Producer from their website. For QuickTime, upgrade to Quicktime Pro.

>>will the page loading time be impacted by the embedded video?

Not much if you're streaming. The (HTML) page will load right up, but depending on the connection speed of the user there could be a few seconds delay while it buffers before the video plays.

[HughMungus]

Whatever you do, DO NOT LET THE VIDEO START AUTOMATICALLY.

Also, if you want to just stream a short video, use MPEG and serve it off a web server.

For example [display thumbnail images linked to your video clips, so the visitor can choose whether or not to watch them].

[edited by: mivox at 6:52 pm (utc) on May 29, 2003]
[edit reason] removed site URL [/edit]

[Knoopss]

why not autostart?

[henry0]

I think it would be better to present a viewer with a choice
some do not care for video or audio
Plus in my case it concerns information not advertising
so I rather not autostart

regards

[HughMungus]

Because autostarting can stop and/or crash browswers in their tracks. Why autostart a video if people don't explicity want to see it? And how many times do you think people will return to your web page if they have to tolerate waiting for some video to load and slow down whatever else it is they're doing on their computer?

Make it optional.