Hosting Videos?

[Anonymous]

I have been experiementing with videos and I am no where near a master photographer. However it is easy to host images but what about videos? Are there any requirements or limitations to hosting videos on the internet?

[jfugate]

Video is streaming media and as such takes a lot of bandwidth to look decent. You can create very small videos that will play okay over a dial up connection but it will not look very good, nor will it have a very quality sound.

The other limitation is length. Even a few minutes of nice looking video takes several megabytes, and if you are talking about feature length stuff (30 minutes or more), you are talking gigabytes of file size.

You need an ISP that will allow you to host a site on the web that has some decent bandwidth requirements if you plan to present very much video online.

You have several options for video format. The most common one is Window Media player, since most desktop systems use windows. However, windows media player video only looks and sounds so-so. In my experience, Shockwave movies (Macromedia Flash) and Real Media movies look and sound the best. To get Quicktime (Apple) movies that look and sound nice, you will have to resort to larger files.

These days, I'm thinking the most "universal" movie format that should be playable on all computers (Windows, Mac, Linux) with the best overall quality is the Shockwave movie format.

Hope that answers your questions.

[Anonymous]

Best check with your host before uploading video. Video files, even short clips, can be huge and will eat up an enormous amount of bandwidth if it proves popular. Most hosting accounts have traffic limits. I'm setting up a dedicated video server account for a web client to avoid problems with their site.

My hosting company acts professionaly and if I went way over the bandwith, they would call or email a friendly warning that I'm straining their server. Most don't however and will either shut you down immediately, or worse, gleefully start piling on excess bandwith charges without informing you.

Wayne