embed or stream video?

Gone are the days of slow internet connections and waiting for ages to view a low quality 30 second video trailer. With the dawn of high speed broadband, far more powerful personal computers and the new web 2.0 age, many websites now feature high quality video.

The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five all now have their own online streaming websites, where viewers can catch up with the latest episodes broadcasts on their networks. New mobile platforms, including the iPhone, will show high definition video directly on the handset. Which leads to this question:

How do you store and display your video to as many people as possible?

The common convention was for video used to be stored and displayed from the websites own hosting server. It would then be displayed to a viewer in two ways:

Video streaming
video streaming allows the video to be sent and displayed progressively piece by piece to the viewer. This could cause its own problems in so much as the server was then asked to carry the extra load of delivery the video to the end user. End users on a slow connection would often experience a jerky, stop / start experience as the video was sent from the server. For streaming to be effective you need a specific type of web server with software that can deliver video often known as protocols (see this link)

Download to browser
the other way a video can be displayed to an end user is for the browser to download the video and store it in the cache of the browser before displaying the video. There are benefits and drawbacks to downloading the video to the browser, downloading a video takes both time and possibly a large chunk of bandwidth (depending on its size a 5 minute video could be up to 15GB of data). Downloading a video does not suffer from the jerky stop / start issues that streaming does as the video does not normally start playing until it has fully downloaded to the browser.

Both streaming and download both require the end user to have the required browser plugin to display the video correctly. There are numerous codecs that a video can be saved as, some of these include:

Quicktime (.mov or .m4v)
Windows media (.wmv)
DivX (.divx)
Flash (.swf or .flv)
and others that include; AVCHD, MPEG-2 HD and WMV HD), TOD, MOD, M2TS, AVI, MP4 (inc. Sony PSP and Apple iPod), 3GP, SWF, DVD, VOB, VRO, MPEG-1, 2, 4, H.263, H.264, Real Video, DVR-MS, MKV, FLV

This causes consternation and frustration to an end user as they had to constantly keep downloading, installing and keeping up to date all the various video codec plugins, in order to view videos across the internet. It also created problems for the creator of the video as to what format they saved their media in to ensure as wide a coverage as possible. Techniques were developed to allow websites to display a different video dependent on the end users' plugins, but again this was time consuming and did not always cover all the available codecs.

HTML5 and modern ways of storing and displaying video
So where does this leave us and what's the best way to answer our initial question? Well as we have already seen, hosting and displaying video has inherent problems, therefore when Litchfield Morris are tasked with displaying video we use YouTube to host and supply the video within our websites. We do this for a number of reasons:

by uploading the video to YouTube, it is stored and delivered from their far more powerful servers
YouTube encodes the video into numerous formats and codec
when a user requests the video, YouTube supplies the correct format for their browser and plugins
YouTube converts the video into the latest HTML5 format for display on mobile platforms
the video stored on YouTube can have specific keywords and tags applied to it and also a description and website link, thus increasing the number of inbound links to your website
the video is search-able and can be found be people searching or browsing YouTube and other search engines
the possibility exists for other people to embed the video on other websites and hence increase your presence across the internet

There are other video hosting websites such as Vimeo (www.vimeo.com) Goggle Video (http://video.google.com/) and Metacafe (http://www.metacafe.com/) along with many others.

Do you require further help in either creating and editing an video or uploading and displaying a video on your website? then please contact us.

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