wiki:add_video

Version 8 (modified by Jamie McClelland, 15 years ago) ( diff )

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  1. How do I add video to my Website?
    1. Resources
    2. Concepts
    3. Real working examples
      1. Linux
      2. Macintosh
      3. Windows

How do I add video to my Website?

Thanks to Anna at ​Engage Media for help in figuring this out.

Resources

Useful sites:

Concepts

Below are the conceptual steps to take when publishing video on the Internet.

  • Export in your video editing software's native format
  • Convert your file to a format that will make a file small enough to upload to your web site (for example, the xvid format). Linux users, you can use ​ffmpeg; Linux, Mac, or Windows users can download ​mplayer and use the mencoder tool it provides. See ​Engage Media tutorial for details on the settings.
  • At this point, ideally your web site would be configured to accept xvid files and convert them on the fly to a flash format. However, you can also manually do that using Mplayer, which can convert your xvid file to an ogg file or an flv (flash) file or to another format suitable for displaying in a web browser.
  • Your web site should include a flash player (​Flow Player is a free software option).

Real working examples

Linux

Here's an example of using mencode on an m4v file: 

mencoder -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=92 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=150 video-file.m4v -o video-file.avi

Given the complexity of mplayer/mencoder (it does a lot of things), I found ffmpeg to be much simpler to use.

Here's an example of converting a file created by the ​flip video camcorder into a playable flash file. The flip video camcorder uses a wide aspect ratio (1280 x 720) - with the -s 640x360 option I'm preserving the aspect ratio, but cutting it in half to make it smaller. In addition, the flip video camcorder by default has a high bit rate of 10,455 kb per second. I'm reducing the bit rate to 1,500 kbits (with -b 1500k) after experimenting with the best quality to size ratio. 

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -s 640x360 -b 1500k out.flv

I was not able to get ffmpeg to produce a patents-free theora ogg file, so instead I used ​ffmpeg2theora, which sadly has completely different arguments. The following produced a patent free video file: 

ffmpeg2theora --width 640 --height 360 -V 1500k -o out.ogg in.mp4

Macintosh

Please contribute!

Windows

Please contribute!

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