trying to get videos to stream more smoothly

[sodani]

I'm hosting some streaming videos on my site, which are currently .mov files. They are pretty large in size - for example, a 15 second clip takes up about 80 megabytes. Is there a way to compress these so that they aren't so big? Should I have them changed from .mov to some other format?

[rocknbil]

.movs and .wmv's will always have to load before playing. They're supposed to stream, I've never seen it work. Convert them to .flv and put them in a Flash player. You can control the buffer and playback, you don't have the whole video plugin issue (QT drives me absolutely nuts) and you can externalize your code so you don't have invalid <embed> nested within <object>.

[Samizdata]

a 15 second clip takes up about 80 megabytes

Obvious solutions are making it smaller (in pixels) and using a different compression method.

If you must target QuickTime Player I would advise using .mp4 files.

They're supposed to stream, I've never seen it work.

True streaming is generally used for things like live broadcasts or a rotating sequence of recordings, where you join the movie at whatever point in time it happens to be playing.

QuickTime video streaming requires QuickTime (or Darwin) Streaming Server.

It works very well, but as indicated requires a plugin that many Windows users either don't have or don't like, which is why it is rarely used on the web. Great on Macs, though.

True streaming of Flash video requires a Flash Media Server but most people don't bother.

Progressive download - where the movie starts playing as soon as a few seconds worth has been downloaded - is what people are used to on sites like YouTube, and why Flash wins every time.

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[Samizdata]

externalize your code so you don't have invalid <embed> nested within <object>

Perfectly possible for QuickTime using a JavaScript solution such as qtObject (from the people who brought you the popular swfObject, which does the same thing for Flash).

I still use QuickTime on one of my sites - mostly because it has offered QT video for ten years now - but I use Flash exclusively everywhere else, and would advise others to do likewise.

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