CODEWITHSUNDEEP
videovideo-streamingjwplayerrtmp
Student of Hogwarts
Student of Hogwarts

Reputation: 1138

How to implement video on a website?

I'm making a website where a big part of it is serving videos. And as you all know, there are a lot of possibilities in this area. (Flash, HTML5, and each of them has a lot of different possibilities.)

  1. I need the video to be playable on ALL devices, be it FF on a PC, Safari on a Mac, iPad, iPod, Android etc.

  2. I have also looked into RTMP-streaming. If it is possible, I don't want the videos to be downloadable. (And RTMP does help a little here.)

  3. If it is possible, I want the users to be able to "scroll" in the video without having to wait for the part they want to skip to to be downloaded. (I often see video players that load the video from left to right on the timeline, and you have to wait until the part you want to scroll to is downloaded.)

  4. If it is possible, I want to deliver different versions (in terms of resolution and size) of the video depending on the bandwith and screen size.

In case it will have an impact on the decision:

  1. Another part of the website is to record video/audio, and being able to preview it immediately after they press Stop Recording.

I suppose the two last ones need a media streaming server? What would/could the complete setup look like? I have looked at JWPlayer and liked it very much.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 437

Answers (1)

av501
av501

Reputation: 6729

Flash is your best bet because of coverage it has today on most devices [not iOS/MacOS ones though]. For iOS you need HLS streaming which will cover the mac via Safari also. JWPlayer is a good player. There are others also like flowplayer.

Now the issue here is that getting videos served in different devices with screen size / bandwidth etc needs a bit of intelligence and you to understand a lot above video and streaming in general. Also there are issues about

  • Device detection on the fly
  • Transcoding on the fly vs predefined files depending on popularity of content and devices you want to support
  • Protocol support for all devices. Eg. iOS and MacOS are different than others. If something does not have flash you have to serve through html5 or something else.
  • Bandwidth detection and video adaptation.

It is a non trivial problem to solve if you want all of the above. Entire companies are built around the job of delivering optimized video to all devices. So while it is doable, it does require a lot of effort to get "all devices with variation of b/w, size to match the device etc" to get going.

So my advice is that you should get the most popular devices supported first and also create videos offline to cover those devices. This should cover 80% of your devices and use cases. Then create a set of samples for your video that will server the remainder of the devices but not necessarily optimally. Couple of format/resolutions should cover most devices. Initially don't bother about getting adaptation and other things. Don't try to aim for "all under all conditions most optimally considering the content, devices and b/w as criteria" when you don't even have something up right now.

Upvotes: 1

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