Hosting Movies

[NatDerox]

hello everyone. I'm a film major, and also totally uneducated as to web page hosting etc... I have managed to figure out how to turn Apache on. I would like to be able to put my movies on my homepage so that my friends at other schools can see them, and just to promote myself in general. Streaming would be ideal but I really would be happy with 'Play as it downloads' or even 'Download then Play'. How can I do that with Apache, or do I need something else in order to be able to have my movies online?

 

[JGruber]

Apache is what lets you host a site, or (serves your site to browers)
Are you trying to do this on a personal computer?

In order to 'Stream' movies from your site, you need to have them in a low bit rate made for streaming video. Normally I would convert them into a flash file and use Flash to stream...

But if you dont know how to do that, your best bet is to just put a link on your home page and allows people to download right to there computer.

 

[mnkeybsness]

do you want streaming or progressive download?

Progressive download is much more common and can be done without any extra setup. Just embed them into your HTML. (this is also the most common use with Flash video). For quicktime movies, just select Export from the File menu and use one of the presets for Internet viewing.

Streaming is much different and much more complex to set up. You would need a Quicktime or Flash streaming server installed. While this provides you with more security from having your movies downloaded, it is much more complex and I would not recommend it for a newbie in the area.

 

[NatDerox]

yes, I'm doing this on a personal computer (this means that when my computer is off people cant acess my site right?)

I'm shooting for streaming....I sort of figured it out (i describe it below). Even though right now im not concerned with security since I'm not making any films intended for public view yet, however at some point it may become an issue.

anyways, here's an update on my progress


i was screwing around and looking at some online documentation and I managed to set up a quicktime streaming server, and get one of the sample movies to work on the page. (I havent created proper files of my films yet for streaming) Its the ugliest page ever, but so far my friends say it works. I'm using MSword to make the page FYI (probably a bad idea...)

Looking through the quicktime streaming server manual I was able to get to the point where I copy-pasted this from the manual and replaced the appropiate parts with the proper names:

<embed src="http://a053089.n1.vanderbilt.edu/~nathanderrick/linkimage.mov"
width=380 height=500 href="rtsp://127.0.0.1/sample_h264_300kbit.mp4" target="QuickTimePlayer">

Then I used MakeRefMovieX application to make the file that links to the movie and put that in the directory with the page

that got the embedded movie on my page. The problem now is that I will eventually have 4 or 5 movies on this page, and I like the viewer to be able to pick which one plays, becuase doing what I did for the sample movie would result in a page with 5 movies on it all on the same page.........all playing at once if the user didn't have to auto-play disabled in quicktime.

Using the very simple and uneducated method I used for the sample movie, would I be able to make, say a list of movie titles or thumbnails of scene, where clicking on the title/thumbnail would open the file and begin playing?

Here is a link to my site, if you are curious to see how horrible it looks..

http://a053089.n1.vanderbilt.edu/~nathanderrick/

Maybe my friends were lying and it actually doesn't work, if you happen to check it out let me know if it works or not.


Also do you have any reccomendations for bitrates/formats for my files? I'm only looking to cater to people with university connections, and I get very good bandwidth both ways from vanderbilt.
I was hoping to be able to get away with a 600-700kbps .mp4 movie, if thats possible, since that looks pretty good even at 720x480. any advice welcome!

 

[theappleguy]

I was hoping to be able to get away with a 600-700kbps .mp4 movie

What is your upstream speed? Remember that you are limited in that respect, especially if more than one person will be viewing at a time. You would be better to buy some hosting that supports streaming, or alternatively just some regular hosting that you could upload the original QuickTime files to.

 

[NatDerox]

I have at least 1.5Mbps upspeed with a cap at 10GB per day, and the goal here is just so my friends at other schools can see my movies as I make them. I have found out how to put a downloadable version on my site (i've decided just to keep it as a directory for now) but I can't get streaming to work. I don't think I understant how to use the whole Quicktime Streaming Server yet, and get a working link/reference movie, if anyone has done that before I could use some advice, step-by-step or whatever. I also would like to know how to link a movie file to an HTML webpage for downloading.

 

[JGruber]

Linking a movie file into a webpage is simple.

Here is a example of how you want it to look -

<a href="http://yourdomain.com/movietitle.extension">Download My Latest Movie</a>

This will show it as -- Download My Latest Movie - Where the text is the actual link.

This is a VERY basic way. You can get all fancy and use javascript to popup a window to the exact size of the movie. - As shown here
"This goes between the <head> & </head> tags.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!-- Begin
function popUp(URL) {
day = new Date();
id = day.getTime();
eval("page" + id + " = window.open(URL, '" + id + "', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=400,height=400,left = 274,top = 62');");
}
// End -->
</script>

To open the Movie with the dimensions of 400x400 you would use this piece of code

<a href="javascript:popUp('linktoyourmovie.extension)">Download My Latest Moive!</a>

I hope I didn't lose you on any of this!

If you have any questions or problems. PM Me.

 

[NatDerox]

Thanks!! I'll rewrite some stuff and test it out