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The client initially did not want the videos on YouTube. Having them on Youtube would be beneficial to them and definitely to me as it will be easy to add YouTube videos to the site using a couple different plugins. BUT, if they can’t be talked into using YouTube I’m going to need another option.

The files they are providing are WMV and have a large file size, so they will have to be converted to FLV or something. Any ideas for easily adding videos to the site? I will want to list them on a page, so I was thinking maybe a videos channel and I would have a field to upload the video to a specific directory ( will i have file upload size problems? ) Then on the template generate a link to the video and somehow pass the file name to a player in a popup window of separate page or something…Any ideas? Thanks!

Have you looked into Amazon S3 for the hosting of the videos.  Serving the videos from the server is going to be the main issue you have to tackle, obviously.  There are a few up loaders available for EE that support Amazon S3, which a few of my clients have used for large file hosting for that kind of purpose (thereby not having to house their video files on their web server).  And there are several video add-ons for EE that would allow you to create a simple field type for the Amazon file address, for example, to allow you to pull the file into your player.  There’s definitely options for the client outside of YouTube - they may be a little pricier than free, but they’re out there.  If they absolutely want to server the file from the web server itself, an EE add-on like Mega Upload may be needed.  Your approach to set up a video channel is the same way I would tend to do it - the specific fields setup will be determined largely by what you decide to setup for the upload and storage of the files.

Hope that helps.

YouTube and Vimeo are the two that spring to mind with Vimeo being the ‘pro’ choice which does also cost real $$$

Throw in the (Free and rather good) Channel Videos add-on and you are all set. This can handle videos from YouTube and Vimeo.

The other advantage you have with using a 3rd party service is encoding and all the various formats you need to get your head around for devices.

You could checkout brightcove they have a pretty good offering. It is similar to youtube but is paid. They are pretty easy to integrate with EE as well (I have done it several times).

As for hosting the videos yourself that is quite the undertaking. I wouldn’t think there would be any upload limits unless you have them set in PHP or EE. They should be aware that it will take a long time to upload a large video, and there isn’t a progress bar or anything to give feedback on how it’s going.

If you host the videos yourself then you will also need to implement some kind of video player. Which entails more work. Also if you need to convert them then that is more work. Hopefully you have made them aware of that.

Bottom line I would avoid hosting the videos yourself at all costs. There are several options available for video hosting, if they don’t want something as public as youtube or vimeo, check out brightcove.

Thanks for the help everyone! Luckily we talked them into using YouTube, so that should make things easier for everyone!