Best way of presenting media (avi, mpg) files

Get Started
1

Hello

I’ve never had to put movie clips into a site before and now would like to display movies on my site. I have them in mpg format, but can convert them to avi’s if that’s better.

There is so much information out there i was hoping someone could condense it with a few pointers on the best practice of displaying videos to web site users.

I understand i can either use the object tag to allow windows media player inside the page to render the video (but there is a pop-up about content being run which is quite offputting) or the embed tag for non-ie browsers. What are the pros/cons of each?

Alternatively i have been looking at flash players, but do not know much about them - again, what are the pros and cons, are they better than the object/embed approach, more usable/accessible, and are there any good (preferably free) players that you can recommend? Will a flash player be able to play avi/mpg clips at all?

Advice is appreciated :slight_smile:

2

Flash is the way to go imo. you can host your videos on youtube (and use it as a source of traffic at the same time) or you can grab a flash player puglin depending on the cms you use.

3

I had to do this recently (but only for a handful of videos) and my opinion is a flash video playing system is best. I think it’s a lot more likely that people will have the Flash plugin than things like the Windows Media plugin or VLC plugin. For instance, I long have not had them installed. They’re clunky, slow and sometimes don’t work.

You’re best advised to convert your videos to FLV or MP4, and then use something like Flowplayer or the JW Player to play your videos. You can obtain software that will allow you to batch convert all your videos. VLC can do it (File > Convert/Save…) but there’s probably software out there that is dedicated to doing this. There are websites too, but you have to upload your videos first.

The other alternative is to upload them to a service like Vimeo, but then they are accessible via Vimeo and perhaps even search engine results. You may not want that.

4

Thanks for the replies. Agreed on the flash front, looks very promising, especially jwplayer. Only problem is the site uses tinymce and tinybrowser, which doesn’t allow upload or embedding of flv files - so users at the moment are resorting to windows media player embedded in the page :frowning: