Streaming Vidoes via website

Loki · 12 May 2006 at 10:40

Can anyone give any tips or point em in the direction of any tutorials for streaming media via website. Predominantly these will be .mov type files. Propbably be a few movies played in a loop.

Whats the best way to do this ?

Sirrel Squirrel · 12 May 2006 at 11:10

To play the videos in a loop, you'll probably be better off using wmv videos as you can set up a playlist using a .asx file, although there is probably a way to do it with quicktime files as well but I don't know how. I take it you know how to encode the videos to wmv already.

Basically to stream the videos you want various bit rates so people can choose what sort of quality and size they want. Streaming the actual video is easy, just add a media player object onto your website where you want the video to play, and set it to the relevant size, if you're using wnidows media player for the media player you need to add on 72px for the height of the player as this is where the controls go.

To stream all the videos in a loop you will need an asx file, which you can make in notepad, you can copy the code for my asx file, which is

<asx version="3">
<entry><ref href = "hqtitle.wmv"/></entry>
<entry><ref href = "hq_maxpayne.wmv"/></entry>
</asx>

My asx file is in the same folder as the videos so I can use the short files names, to add more videos to the playlist, just add extra
<entry><ref href = "file.wmv"/></entry> lines.

My .asx file is saved as stream.asx, you then set this as the file to play in your media player, so the media player code on your page will look something like

Code:

<embed
      type="application/x-mplayer2"
      pluginspage="http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/Downloads/Contents/MediaPlayer/"
      width="640"
      height="552"
      src="stream.asx"
      FileName="stream.asx"
      autostart="1"
      showcontrols="1"
      showstatusbar="1"
      showdisplay="0"
      autorewind="0"
      PlayCount="1"
      ShowPositionControls="False"
      EnablePositionControls="False"
      EnableTracker="False"
    ></embed>

The code I've listed is for the high quality stream of this max payne video on my website http://www.mia-media.co.uk/videopage/maxpayne.html so you can have a look through my source as it is on the actual page as well.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any more questions.

JamesU2005 · 12 May 2006 at 20:23

Yes wmv is the best format with file size and quality in mind.

weescott · 12 May 2006 at 22:11

Also, check your hosting supports streaming (mms), an alternative is to convert to swf which which can stream and can be a cheaper alternative.

blade007 · 12 May 2006 at 22:51

there was a link on this forum to a site that is like a wmv-o-matic.

was very good .., I used it to good effect

can't remember the link, though

Sirrel Squirrel · 13 May 2006 at 10:49

weescott said:
Also, check your hosting supports streaming (mms), an alternative is to convert to swf which which can stream and can be a cheaper alternative.

You don't need to have mms, media player will just automatically stream the video file, as you can see if you click the link in my earlier post so see one of my videos.

Also should have mentioned that you can freely download windows media encoder from Microsoft's website.

weescott · 13 May 2006 at 20:19

Sirrel Squirrel said:
You don't need to have mms, media player will just automatically stream the video file, as you can see if you click the link in my earlier post so see one of my videos.

Also should have mentioned that you can freely download windows media encoder from Microsoft's website.

true. my bad

Loki · 15 May 2006 at 08:43

weescott said:
Also, check your hosting supports streaming (mms), an alternative is to convert to swf which which can stream and can be a cheaper alternative.

Does converting to .swf format reduce the file size in anyway. ?

Sirrel Squirrel · 15 May 2006 at 14:04

swf normally takes up more space

Loki · 15 May 2006 at 14:08

can you sepcify quality on .swf format. Also can anyone recommend a reasonably good peice of software to do this with available as shareware or open source

Loki

Sirrel Squirrel · 15 May 2006 at 17:22

You can specify the bit rate of an swf file, with flash there are actually 2 ways of having a movie, as an swf or as an flv, which is what google video, youtube etc use as you can have media controls like play, forward, back and volume, theres a program that converts movies to flash format called sorenson squeeze and there is a free program out there but can't remember the name, think its in a thread somewhere.