Ray, >> asking us our advice for hosting of a site that will >> be streaming a lot of video. Basically, the site is >> going to host virtual tours for Real Estate.
I run a video/gaming Machinima website (www.halomovies.org) as a hobby and have looked into the issue of serving video directly for both streaming and "progressive download" formats. Most video players support the HTTP progressive download feature which in my opinion for most uses is an adequate way of delivering short 1-10min video clips from your web server. For bandwidth the key issues are overall bandwidth and peak bandwidth. Depending on the type of video content you may be subject to high peak periods where many are attempting to get the "new" video (The Slashdot effect) verses a fairly steady flow of video viewers. With progressive download you can easily calculate bandwidth requirements by "guessing" the traffic and multiplying that by the file sizes. Calculating streams can become problematic because then you have the balance the number of available streams from the server with the number of users. This tends to cause you to over purchase streams. With Progressive download the ONLY thing to consider is bandwidth because you are delivering the video file just as if it were an image file. So if you have a unique traffic peak you just pay for the bandwidth spike as they occur instead of trying to balance the number of available streams. Also you can manage the video file as you would any other file in your website, whereas with real streaming the videos must be placed into specific locations on the server to be streamed and pointer files created to direct the user to the stream. Streams are most often used today for live video feeds where you are not serving pre-recorded video clips or for larger or longer videos where the stream can adapt to the clients bandwidth and become more efficient. On my website (www.halomovies.org) I chose to NOT deliver the video to a player but force the user to download the entire file in a ZIP archive. The reason for my choice, which in your case would not be the correct one, was to control the bandwidth more closely. I found that when we delivered our content to an embedded video player the same user would come back several times over a couple of weeks to view the video again and again using up our precious bandwidth. By forcing them to download the video on the first visit they could watch the video as often as they liked without using our bandwidth to do so. For a commercial or advertising venture this would not be an acceptable user experience. Balancing these decisions all depends on the type of user; ours was 13-17 year old kids, and the type of video content and its purpose. As for the video format the three major ones are WMP9 (.WMV), QuickTime (.MOV) and now Flash Video (.FLV). all have plus and minuses as a format but the Flash format allows for embedding the player into your own unique format and in many cases using the Sorenson CODEC has a better compression with acceptable quality. In addition the flash format is pretty ubiquitous where as the WMP9 doesn't play well with Macs and the QuickTime requires a plug-in on Windows. The flash format requires a plug-in but you can serve a custom version from your website to either platform. You can see a sample of a flash movie 30 second clip here http://www.halomovies.org/index.cfm?pg=3&fid=1130 it was encoded for 150Kb data stream and turned the video file into a 1.1meg file vrs the original WMV which was encoded at 2Mbs and was 6Meg. For me bandwidth usage and allocation was top priority over the user experience. Your mileage will vary Best Regards, Dennis Powers UXB Internet - A website design and Hosting Company 690 Wolcott Road P.O. Box 6029 Wolcott, CT 06716 Tel: (203)879-2844 http://www.uxbinternet.com/ http://www.uxb.net/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:256934 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
