Displaying live video on my website can anyone tell me how?

Display live video on my website..

[beltmelt]

Hello can anyone tell me how to create live video.

Assume I have a widget website and I would live to show a brief 5 minute video on how to construct a blue widget. Is it software or is it code that is used to accomplish this and does the person need to download this or can the person watch it live from my website
(the preferred option). I would love to have this done as it would be a great addition to my website in terms of driving traffic.

using some thing like real player etc would be optional . but how do I do it. Ive got a VCR and DVD do I get the video, then how do I up load it to the server and which software should they watch it in..

Help please..

[bill]

You'll probably need a video capture card on your PC. You've got to have a way to get the video into your PC. Then you need to rip the raw video files. That can take a lot of disk space depending on the source. Then you encode the video into your preferred format. I think WMV format is pretty common. Once you've done all this then it's usually easiest just to place a link to the file. If you want to embed the video into a page then it gets a little more complicated.

[staigerman]

you might use video screen capture software like quat Qarbon makes, or camtasia, I use and like hypercam from hyperionics.com, it's the more affordable of the others I've seen (Robodemo is now by Macromedia, yet another option to check out). When you have your Avi file you may want to convert it to Windows Movie - the Windows Media Encoder tools are free. Check the downloads area at Microsoft

snipped

This is great when you have audio too. Another ay to present tutorials is with more static screen captures and still have the cursor movement smooth by spline interpolation between captured positions, like the way it's done in Viewlet Builder from Qarbon.

Many of these tools allow saving Flash too. Which opens a large qudience.

Another format to consider would be Quicktime. The Quicktime Pro option is only around $30 and lets you convert your Avi as captured from screencapture or other sources to Quicktime for streaming, to Mpeg and other.

Even the tools which are marketed for video capture and editing from cameras like Pinnavcle Studio 8 (now v9) have choices for saving to various formats including RealMedia and WIndows Media.

Within Avi, there are also quite a number of choics. Consider the codecs used, and you'll find that some do a great job with compression, you might want to consider DivX 5.x for example.

Another tool, perhaps more a gizmo, is GifMovieGear, which can also import Avi and save back to Avi, with various Codecs. But you may not have the audio with that so this could work only if it's purely visual. In that case though it also has a Flash export option. Not streamed though.

There are some tools which can take Avi files and embed them into Flash or Flash MX in a streaming way, i.e. for immediate viewing without lengthy buffering or downloading. That's neat. I've used Boomer Video 4 for that but again no audio. Boomer Audio would create a separate audio stream. snipped

-Philip

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 3:45 pm (utc) on July 21, 2004]
[edit reason] URLs removed [/edit]