A client of mine has asked for me to embed a video on his web page.
It is 2GB in size, 45 minutes long and its format is .mpg
I’ve never had to do this before and wasn’t sure of the best way to go about things. My initial idea was to cut the film into three pieces, upload it to Youtube and then embed the Youtube video on the client’s website.
However, the disadvantage with Youtube is the advertising they will presumably overlay on the video and the fact that people can leave really silly/rude comments on the YouTube site which could reflect badly on the client.
What do you think?
Is Youtube the way to go?
Are there any other advantages / disadvantages to this approach?
How else could I go about embedding a film on a web site?
Are there any other web services offering the same thing (it doesn’t matter if they are not free).
Is it feasible to host the video myself?
I think you can turn off comments in YouTube. Anyhow, you can certainly host the video on your own server, just like images and other assets, but then you pay for the downloads, and they may be slower than on big sites like YouTube that specialize in content delivery. There are lots of other video sites, like Vimeo, Screencast.com, BlipTV, Viddler, Wistia… lots but them, though they don’t all allow commercial video, and each has its own conditions on top of that.
If you host the video yourself, it’s best to embed it inside a player of some sort (so that visitors can stop, rewind, view full screen etc). A nice one that I’ve used is FlowPlayer. There are free and paid versions of this.
One thing you might consider if hosting yourself is sign up to a content delivery network like Rackspace Cloud or Amazon S3. These are hosting sites that are set up for fast delivery and have cheaper bandwidth than your own web host. I use Rackspace and it’s great—very easy to use. So, you host the large files like video on these instead of on your own site, and just link to them from the page where they appear. (It’s basically the same as linking to the video on YouTube, except that it’s on server space that you rent, but server space optimized for fast delivery.)
Thanks very much for your reply.
It polarized what I was thinking and have decided to go with YouTube, as you are right, YouTube specialize in serving content and have many servers dedicated to doing solely that.
The video in question was made by my client and stars my client, so he definitely owns the rights. But I just want to ask to be doubly sure: is it ok to upload this video to YouTube and embed it on his commercial site? Do you know if there are any legal issues to consider?
