Placing a Video on your WebSite
With the advent of broadband, video has become mainstream. The appeal of video among Internet users is undeniable. Video portals like You Tube (#3 in the world) are among the most popular websites globally and with the expansion of broadband in every continent, the trend can only go upwards. Add to that the fact that online attention spans are notoriously short, and you’ll understand why video will help you attract and keep more visitors in your website.
The technology involved in putting up videos on the Internet has also evolved, and now it is possible for the average user to film a video, process it, add some effects, upload it, and post it on your own website. However there are several things that must be taken into account when hosting your own videos.
First of all, due to their inherent size, video files should be compressed before uploading them onto a web site. Using some advanced compression techniques of audio and video digital data and converting the video files to formats such as MPEG-4, its size can be greatly reduced.
Most video compression techniques operate under the premise that much of the data that compose an image is redundant and not really necessary for achieving a level of quality that is good enough for the human eye.
Video compression is a trade-off between disk space, bandwidth and video quality. There are some advanced compression programs like Sorenson Squeeze that will compress video files to the maximum without any noticeable loss of quality. It is very important to choose the right software for the compression, because if the video is not properly compressed, visible artifacts may appear.
A video codec is the software that enables the compression and decompression of digital video. There is a complex balance between the video quality, the bit rate needed to represent it, the complexity of the encoding and decoding algorithms, robustness to data losses and errors, ease of editing, random access, the state of the art of compression algorithm design, end-to-end delay, and a number of other factors.
Among the most widely-used software codecs are:
Lossless codecs
- Huffyuv: Huffyuv (or HuffYUV) is a very fast, lossless Win32 video codec written by Ben Rudiak-Gould and published under the terms of the GPL as free software, meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format.
- Lagarith: A more up-to-date fork of Huffyuv is available as Lagarith.
MPEG-4 Part 2 codecs
- DivX Pro Codec: A proprietary MPEG-4 ASP codec made by DivX, Inc.
- Xvid: Free/open-source implementation of MPEG-4 ASP, originally based on the OpenDivX project.
- FFmpeg MPEG-4: Included in the open-source libavcodec codec library, which is used by default for decoding and/or encoding in many open-source video players, frameworks, editors and encoding tools such as MPlayer, VLC, ffdshow or GStreamer. Compatible with other standard MPEG-4 codecs like Xvid or DivX Pro Codec.
- 3ivx: A commercial MPEG-4 codec created by 3ivx Technologies.
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codecs
- x264: A GPL-licensed implementation of the H.264 video standard. x264 is only an encoder.
- Nero Digital: Commercial MPEG-4 ASP and AVC codecs developed by Nero AG.
- QuickTime H.264: H.264 implementation released by Apple.
- DivX Pro Codec: An H.264 decoder and encoder was added in version 7.
Microsoft codecs
- WMV (Windows Media Video): Microsoft’s family of proprietary video codec designs including WMV 7, WMV 8, and WMV 9. The latest generation of WMV is standardized by SMPTE as the VC-1 standard.
- MS MPEG-4v3: A proprietary and not MPEG-4 compliant video codec created by Microsoft. Released as a part of Windows Media Tools 4. A hacked version of Microsoft’s MPEG-4v3 codec became known as DivX 😉.
Other codecs
- VP6, VP6-E, VP6-S, VP7, VP8: Proprietary high definition video compression formats and codecs developed by On2 Technologies used in platforms such as Adobe Flash Player 8 and above, Adobe Flash Lite, Java FX and other mobile and desktop video platforms. Supports resolution up to 720p and 1080p. VP8 has been made open source by Google under the name libvpx or VP8 codec library.
- libtheora: A reference implementation of the Theora video compression format developed by the Xiph.org Foundation, based upon On2 Technologies’ VP3 codec, and christened by On2 as the successor in VP3’s lineage. Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4 video and similar lower-bitrate video compression schemes.
- Schrödinger and dirac-research: implementations of the Dirac compression format developed by BBC Research at the BBC. Dirac provides video compression from web video up to ultra HD and beyond.
- DNxHD codec: a lossy high-definition video production codec developed by Avid Technology. It is an implementation of VC-3.
- Sorenson 3: A video compression format and codec that is popularly used by Apple’s QuickTime, sharing many features with H.264. Many of the QuickTime movie trailers found on the web use this compression format.
- Sorenson Spark: A codec and compression format that was licensed to Macromedia for use in its Flash Video starting with Flash Player 6. It is considered as an incomplete implementation of the H.263 standard.
- RealVideo: Developed by RealNetworks. A popular compression format and codec technology a few years ago, now fading in importance for a variety of reasons.
- Cinepak: A very early codec used by Apple’s QuickTime.
- Indeo, an older video compression format and codec initially developed by Intel.
All the codecs above have their qualities and drawbacks, and comparative benchmarks for each format can easily be found in the media. The trade-off between rate of compression , speed, and quality is usually considered the most important figure for ranking higher on those comparisons.
The most popular video compression formats at the moment are Sorenson 3, DivX, MPEG-4, XviD, and 3ivx. However, the individual choices may vary depending upon, and with the advent of new video compression formats, which are under development at the moment and provide very good quality at increasingly lower bitrates, the choices are ever endless.
And last, but not least, before posting your videos online, you must understand the concepts of bandwidth and transfer that apply to your particular hosting plan. Failure to do so could end up inflicting some unexpected and quite high charges on your web hosting account.
RackNine can help you place all kinds of multimedia material on your website, hosted on our own servers or the ones of your choice.
For more information please Contact Us.
Ian Randolph
I think something is wrong with a video from YouTube and I can’t view it on my site..
Hey do you know how to place YouTube videos? I can’t seem to be able to do it myself…
Randie Noven
Great information here. I have a friend actor whos thinking of putting up videos of his performances on his website and this should be very useful to him
Hellen Purse
One of the main uses of videos on your websites is to advertise political campaigns and I wonder if you’d be willing to cater for political candidates here in the US?
Please let us know by e-mail, thank you.
Carl Mathews
Video is such a great resource. I enjoy seeing websites that understand the value of providing video material and after reading this article I realize is not expensive to add. I can’t really understand why there aren’t more websites broadcasting videos as the cost is minimal.
Vince Turon
This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher! All the rest I found about placing videos is either irrelevant or misguiding…
Mark Kopland
Great post, perhaps you should have mentioned though that today, nearly all commonly used video compression methods apply some cosine transform for spatial redundancy reduction. Google ITU-T or ISO for more information.
Conrad Gulliver
Valuable info. Lucky me I found your site by accident, I bookmarked it.
Martha Reynolds
If you could e-mail me with a few suggestions on just how to make an interesting video, I would be grateful.
Rick McKnight
Hi Martha,
Please contact Us through this page:
https://www.racknine.com/blog/contact-us/
and we’ll be happy to explain to you the different options.
Thank you
Web Design
We had an exciting and busy 2010 – to celebrate the arrival of 2011 we are going to create a sensational video.
Stay tuned 🙂
John Whittemore
Wouldn’t it be easier to just upload the videos to YouTube and then embed them into the HTML at my website?
Rick McKnight
John,
YouTube is definitely very easy to use and being free, you don’t have to worry about bandwidth and transfer fees.
But, and this is a big but, videos are limited in size and length. Even though last July, YouTube increased its upload time limit from 10 to 15 minutes, and to up to 2 GB in size, that still is clearly not enough for most video requirements.
Also, many people would deem unprofessional to have your videos hosted anywhere else than your own server.
Collin Gulliver
Thanks for the idea, you sparked it from a angle I hadn’t given thought to yet. Now lets see if I can do something with it.
Ulla Popken
just needed you to know I have added a video to my website, but somehow is interfering with the blog layout. But I’m not sure if the theme is the problem or is it the other way around 🙁
Rick McKnight
Hi Ulla,
We need to have a look at your website to diagnose what the problem might be.
If you prefer you can e-mail us from the following page:
https://www.racknine.com/blog/contact-us/
Thanks
Ronald Tullow
Thanks for the useful information and tips.
Omadeus Hatter
I can’t see the video from my blog….
I actually wanted to place a video in some of the ways you are mentioning on this website so i can share with my friends and family, but the results are not what I expect
Chad
Actually, the post is actually pretty informative on the topic. I agree with your conclusions and will look forward to contact you
Barbara Tweed
I would like to express my appreciation for this post.
This blog always puts such good contents. Thank you for the information, detailed and clear.
Dan Stamm
videos can be very large in size
what is the best way to reduce size? without losing quality, or at least not toomuch
Megan Starr
This really solved my problem, thank you!
Oliver Watson
Interesting …..
I would also like to build a social network and include my videos there
Helen Doris
Very interesting post. I liked the first part so much as the information are detailed and clear. This blog always puts such good contents. Thank you for the information. You may also like to visit my blog, you’re welcome to contact me and provide suggestions on how to embed a video there.
Thank you 🙂
Lenny
I have always wanted to post videos on my website and this put me on the right direction.Now i know how to do it. Cheers.
Josh
No matter how hard I try i can’t get this thing to do what I want it to do.
Can you help?
Regards, Josh
Bob
hey very good info on putting vids on y0 page
TIM
It’s like you read my mind! You appear to know that and so do I think that you could do with some videos to drive the message home a little bit more effective.
Thanks for sharing!