Embedding movies

Gordon

How do you guys embed movie clips? I've tried providing my latest website of hot chicks playing the violing with embedded movies and quicktime links for download and neither seem great.

My preferred method is to use a flash movie file embedded in a hidden iFrame. However, this 3 minute movie clip is around 4 or 5 megabytes and the size is quite tiny - 150x115 pixels. Even on 386 ADSL download one gets clipping due to the download speed being slower than the frame play speed. Not only that but this option and the downloadable link to the quicktime file 'doesn't work' for my client. She's a bit sketchy and keeps sending me hotmail html attachments as opposed to actual attachments and sends me shortcuts to jpgs instead of actual jpgs so it's a tad tricky to find out her PC specs.

How does Google video and Youtube do it? They embed movies within a flash player - the quality isn't spectacular but the download speeds are reasonable for the size.

Gordon

Bump!

Ph3n0m

youtube converts the video file to a different format that is then played within their flash player

The format is .flv - that might be a route to investigate

http://www.fwzone.net/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=11428

Serbian

When you upload your video to Google Videos and YouTube, they use Flash Media Server to stream the video to a Flash Video (.flv) player.

I have been looking into converting .mov, .avi, .wmv etc on the fly as, from what I hear, Flash Media Server is very expensive (can't find pricing on their site). If I could find a .flv converter that had a command line interface I could do it, but as of yet I haven't found a program that does have one.

Gordon

Thanks guys. I had originally gone via the flv route actually, I should have said. Although I wasn't using a form of media server (cheers for the links). The flv is, seemingly, a better form of flash video as syncing (video/audio) issues may occur if using a simple flash movie and optimised for web movies are massive as presumably they chop the video and audio into seperate keyframes.

I think I'm going to try off-site methods such as Youtube or Google Video. I'm guessing they wouldn't be cool with embedding the video but at least I could link to it.

Thanks for the feedback.

Serbian

Gordon wrote:

I think I'm going to try off-site methods such as Youtube or Google Video. I'm guessing they wouldn't be cool with embedding the video but at least I could link to it.

YouTube give you instructions on how to embed movies on your own page, so I'd imagine it's not a problem for them. There are tutorials for embedding Google Video but Google don't explicitly give instructions on how to do this so they may not be so happy to let you do this.

Gordon

Then what am I worrying about?! Fantastic news Serb, thanks for the help.

Rollo Tamasi

i was going to tell you to use youtube back when you orginally posted this thread but i never bothered as i thought you would have known about the youtube sharing thingy...

no need to say thanks to me though