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Looking to just discuss this topic in general as I am planning on adding some video capabilities to an EE site.

Basically planning to offer members the ability to upload short video clips, that would live under their profile and could be viewable by other members.

Right now, I am thinking S3 for storage/delivery, probably VideoJS for playback, and all very achievable in EE.

Most of my concerns are around two things:

1. Best way for a medium sized site to encode the source video uploaded. +/- 10,000 users per day, only a fraction actually encoding video, and site currently hosted on a shared hosting account.
2. What format to encode to to take advantage of HTML5 - go with the Firefox supported set or the IE9 supported set, or both.
3. Any issues with the upload/encode and storage process if the files are large (e.g. scripts timing out).

Thanks!

DJB

We use zencoder to encode videos our users upload. Zencoder uses AWS so the files move between our buckets in AWS and Zencoder very fast.

We encode int h.264 and ogv for HTML 5 playback and then flv with flash fallback

we havn’t had any issues with timing out, just check your encoding settings so you keep the vids small

Thants Alex,

In terms of cost is that competitive for video encoding? A ten minute clip uploaded would cost ~$0.50 on their PAYG plan, which seems expensive, when you consider that doing Flash, + both HTML videos would be $1.50 for a 10 minute, user uploaded clip.

Thants Alex,

In terms of cost is that competitive for video encoding? A ten minute clip uploaded would cost ~$0.50 on their PAYG plan, which seems expensive, when you consider that doing Flash, + both HTML videos would be $1.50 for a 10 minute, user uploaded clip.

For that particular project the pricing worked out well for our client. Depending on the volume of videos and the length of them, you may want to check out other similar services such as http://www.pandastream.com/pricing_and_signup

Which will give you a dedicated encoder for a fixed monthly price.

All of these services use AWS, so storing your videos with AWS S3 is a good idea. Depending on site traffic and geographic area your visitors come from you look at the Amazon CDN to deliver the videos too.

A

I should also mention depending how technical you are, you could also set up http://www.ffmpeg.org on your server and encode the videos yourself.  Many VPS hosts can assist you in getting this installed/configured.

A

I should also mention depending how technical you are, you could also set up http://www.ffmpeg.org on your server and encode the videos yourself.  Many VPS hosts can assist you in getting this installed/configured.

A

Thanks again Alex. I had assumed that the FFMPEG install would be a no-no on the shared hosting account, but after looking into it, it does seem possible. So I will give it a try - figure it’s better to prove the concept technically and in terms of usage on the site by the users before going “pro” with the services mentioned.

Cheers!

I have experience with Amazon S3 and have been very pleased. Would highly recommend it and you can’t beat the price. With your site being on a shared server I would think you would need to offload this.

Typically I would recommend encoding in MP4 for HTML5 and using a player that can automatically convert to flash if needed (like http://sublimevideo.net/, which is an excellent player that is about to come out of beta).

I’m currently developing a church site that has large videos (45-50 minutes of HD) along with a MP3 and ogg audio file. Instead of using EE to upload these to Amazon S3 I’m having the client directly upload to S3. I think this approach saves them time instead of waiting for an EE post page to save.

I’ve been using JW Player - http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/ and having clients ftp the videos directly to their site. I’ve found uploading via php to not be very effective and have had lots of time out issues (but the videos are typically pretty large in file size).