Embedded movies

Never having done anything along these lines, what is a good size limit for embedded movies?

Susan,
Are you going to stream them in one of the proprietary formats?
If that’s the case the overall MB size is less relevant than the available bandwidth and display size.
I tend to use the flash .flv format and have anything from 2MB to 20MB.
Have a look at http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player
David

If that’s a good & thoughtful movie, I suggest not to bound in size, tools or even audience limit!.

This will be for demo of how to use an item. (can’t be more specific, client is slightly paranoid about getting their ideas ripped off, although once it’s online it will be exposed, so I don’t see the point... <sigh> clients.) I don’t even know what format they’ll want to use, they are just hassling me about how big the files should/should not be. <sigh> clients.

I actually rather like the thought of putting it on UTube, then embedding that on the page. Extra "free" advertising that way too, I would think.

If you do end up being interested in YouTube then consider http://blip.tv as an alternative. Any movie uploaded gets converted to flv format and the option and quality are better than YT.

Well, as I expected, the client doesn’t like the idea at all. What if the external site goes down? (and what if his site goes down??) People can steal his videos... <sigh> clients. It’s all very incestuous, this client (a friend of mine, otherwise I wouldn’t have agreed to do it at all) will have the videos made by a friend of theirs who makes videos, and part of this deal is that I’ll be making a site for the friend as well.

One advantage (?) is that the expected feature creep includes a simple forum, so I’m in the process of building version 1 of a native MODx forum. Should have something very simple (single forum, add topics, reply to topics; chunk templates like Ditto, lots of event traps using custom snippets like eForm) to release in another week or so, then I’ll build more features into it one step at a time.

I hear you on the clients issue. <sigh>...

Bottom line is that if you add video to a page it will be out there for all to see and copy. Same thing goes with still photos. In the end its the client’s judgement call: do the advantages of posting the image/video outweigh the possibility that some could "borrow" the image/video for their own uses? Usually the answer is yes: having the image/video out there helps communicate the skills, services, or products the client is interested in promoting.

If the content is for certain eyes only then MODx provides the tools to facilitate access to those that should view the content while keeping it hidden from the masses.

In the end my view with online video is make it look and sound good. Most folks that post video seem more focused on what format to use than they do with sound quality or proper editing technique. Picking the right codec like .h264 seems to me a smarter route than creating the fuzzy stuff you see on Youtube etc.

This won’t be restricted at all; they want the product demo videos available. They just seem to think that if it’s only viewable from "their" pages, it will be safe... from what, I’m not sure. There’s tons of sites with similar products, and some of them have demo videos as well. Anyway, I told them to just choose a format and make the videos. If they run out of disk space on their (my!) server, they’ll have to pay extra for me to upgrade the server.

@BBloke: Does blip.tv have an API so I can embed it in my page like YouTube does (a snippet already exists for YouTube)?

It does. Here’s my code for it. I adjusted what there was for YouTube.

Quote from: sottwell at Apr 09, 2008, 12:00 PM

This won’t be restricted at all; they want the product demo videos available. They just seem to think that if it’s only viewable from "their" pages, it will be safe... from what, I’m not sure. There’s tons of sites with similar products, and some of them have demo videos as well. Anyway, I told them to just choose a format and make the videos. If they run out of disk space on their (my!) server, they’ll have to pay extra for me to upgrade the server.

It’s always tempting to just tell the client that you’ll put it on YouTube using their special "anti-theft, virtual watermark" feature so no one can steal it and that it will be on YouTube’s new, secret, utterly crash-proof server that only a few people know about. Or just tell them it’s on your server and that you’re just using YouTube as a "Portal" to enhance availability. Of course I’d never do that but it’s fun to imagine.