Streaming Media

[leliphent]

Ok i have an .mpeg file I want to be able to be viewed by the public, but when i click the link to it, it takes like 10 mins to load... so i was thinking that streaming would be a possibility... but as you figured this is all very foreign to me....

can someone suggest how to get this file to view without having to wait 37 days?

[monkeythumpa]

Convert it to Windows Media or a Quicktime file. But be prepared for more space and bandwidth requirements. Streaming files are bigger than non streaming files.

[leliphent]

how would one convert to quicktime?

[HughMungus]

Use Windows Media. The encoder is free and it's really the most ubiquitous format.

[leliphent]

windows media.... is this something i can grab off of c-net?

[schwartz]

Have you considered outputing to flash?

[leliphent]

moving .mpeg to flash.... hmm thats a thought.... although not too familiar with flash... do you think that it will cut the download time down significantly?
by the way its a 3 min movie

[schwartz]

Flash files are typically smaller in size to comparable real/windows files. You can adjust Flash streaming movies/audio to download are certain percentage before streaming, etc. It's fairly customizable. If you output a couple variations to accomodate dialup and dsl/broadband, you shouldn't have to worry about download time for either (for only 3 minutes in length).

[leliphent]

ok so can anyone give me the step by step on how to do this in flash?

[schwartz]

I personally use a tool called Flix Pro which is one of several that can handle this in a wizard-like fashion. The steps are numerous and I'm not a flash expert... I let the tool handle that for me.

[leliphent]

yeah i lloked for flix pro and i have to buy it... i will keep looking... anyone else have any suggestions?

[Terabytes]

Import your movie just like you'd import a graphic into flash... (insert a keyframe, FILE/IMPORT (your movie)

It will ask you several questions about movie output size and such (pretty straight forward...)

play with it in this state and see if you can get the file size down...

just my 2-cents...
Tera

[leliphent]

yeah i tried that... and the program would time out when attempting to test movie...
its 42,605kb file

[Edouard_H]

You might try Wind*ws Movie Maker (in Accessories on XP). You should be able to import .mpeg/.mpg and save the movie as .wmv. When saving don't choose "Web", choose "My Computer" and you can select from a variety of export options, eg broadband, dial up, etc. Fairly straightforward operation.

[leliphent]

ok i did that got it down to 10 mb which is better... but, now it downloads from the site, and I want it to stream ... is there a <tag> I should use?

[leliphent]

does anyone know anything about clipstream? how much it costs...? is it worth the cost? etc..

[schwartz]

You might as well buy Flix Pro if you're doing to think about clipstream.

[leliphent]

yeah but isnt a flix pro for interaction with flash?

[schwartz]

Flix will take any media file (mpeg, mp3, whatever) and output to flash with embedded player toggles (if desired) in customizable outputs. I've used it at an organization for *all* their media successfully (hundreds of thousands of views). If you're wanting to stream any kind of media, this will work for you.

[leliphent]

from what i could gather from clipstream was that it included a player inbeded in the site... as in no dl time and cross browser ready.... this could be accessed by persons on a 56k...
will this other option provide this capability?

[schwartz]

Yes, you just upload flash file somewhere on your server, drop in flash object code (which it can generate for you) into your html and you're done. It can begin playing auto for you if you want or you can choose how many seconds to wait while it begins streaming, etc.

Here's a sample I did a couple years back:

<Sorry, no personal URLs.
See Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 5:40 am (utc) on June 23, 2005]

[danimal]

i believe that the clipstream player is java-based, and since the borg no longer include java in i.e., your visitors will have to download it and install it from somewhere else, before they can watch a clipstream video clip.

it is a very inefficent codec anyway, so you aren't missing much.

windows media 9 has the best combo of player penetration and codec quality, and it's free, as was posted earlier... flash video can be good, but only if you encode it with the professional two-pass encoder, which is $$$... sorenson squeeze.

i just put up a new codec website that compares all this stuff, with downloadable clips, but since i'm a noob lurker and it has adsense, i guess posting the link would violate the t.o.s. out here.

[schwartz]

flash video can be good, but only if you encode it with the professional two-pass encoder, which is $$$... sorenson squeeze.

Actually... flix pro does two pass and it starts at about $40.

[leliphent]

something to keep in mind... if you have it, could i send you the file, and you send everything back to me? or is that not too cool?

[danimal]

the flix pro product line was taken over by on2 a few weeks ago, and that product lists for $149.

there are mitigating issues wrt the video quality and audio codecs used by flix pro... in particular, i have not compared the wildform codec with the sorenson spark pro 3 codec that squeeze uses, but i kinda doubt that they are comparable.

on2 has it's own codecs, tho, so at $149, or whatever the price is, it could be a bargain if the codecs get upgraded... thanks for pointing this out! we need to keep an eye on it.

[schwartz]

the flix pro product line was taken over by on2 a few weeks ago, and that product lists for $149.

They now offer flix lite for $49 that offers most of the options/features.

there are mitigating issues wrt the video quality and audio codecs used by flix pro... in particular, i have not compared the wildform codec with the sorenson spark pro 3 codec that squeeze uses, but i kinda doubt that they are comparable.

I did extensive tests with both and found flix worked just as well. We output hundreds of videos and audio clips with it without any hitch with outstanding quality. :o)

[danimal]

flix lite does not do 2-pass vbr encoding... as such, it's not an option for professional use... you do understand the pq difference that 2-pass encoding can make, don't you? and the differences in file size that you can get with vbr encoding?

fyi, doing something the wrong way hundreds of times is not much of a recommendation ;-)

[schwartz]

My bad, was under impression that flix-lite did 2-pass. And yes, I do understand how it works.

[leliphent]

ok so explain this 2pass concept to me...

[schwartz]

From what I remember, two encoding passes are needed for high-quality video. I'm not sure of all the details but the quality of anything that just does one pass is sub-par at best.

I pulled this explanation from another site:

The 2-pass VBR (Variable Bitrate) feature reduces the file size while increasing the video quality. What that means in English is that Flix scans the video first to determine scenes with more action and scenes with less action. Flix then encodes the video using the results from the scan to produce a smaller, higher quality video than if the video had been encoded without the initial scan. Although it takes longer to encode the video using this method, the results are well worth the extra wait.