Video Website

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cucc Paul

Guest
Ok I have lots of video footage now of Swildons and Rhinos. Lots of it unedited but good "as is" footage especially alot of the swildons stuff. I am hopeing to film in Swildons again soon so I can make a better video now that I have played with lights and such and so that I can get some footage of bits we skipped though or bypassed.

Does anyone know anything about video compression for websites.

I know of flv but the quality is horrific especially in darker conditions, avi's seem to come out huge (11GB) for an hour in windows movie maker and wmv dont seem to be that small (1.53GB aprox) for an hour. My intentions are to setup a website with all the video content available for free with no or limited addverts etc where you can either download in higher quality or watch streamed in a You tube style. Streaming will have to be flv I think or some new format thats emerging but not well supported yet and which i don't understand at all, but seems to avoid the use as mp3 for the sound compresion.

Can anyone think of any features such a website should include, would like to see. Once setup i intend to make it possible to upload caving/caving related videos to the web site as well



Space is unlimited as is bandwidth however minimising these as much as possible would be good. Dowload times, compatability and ease of use are the main factors. (ie people not having to trawl the net for obscure codexs etc).

This is likely to be a longwinded project and probably wont get going fully until later in the year.

ps any one got any good suggestions for caves to video in on mendip or south wales.
 
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darkplaces

Guest
Very large files should be downloaded via bittorrent, otherwise reducing down to 640x480.
Setup an account on video.google and upload it all to that.
 

traff

Member
Divx - only people in the dark ages can't play it. Encode using virtualdub or similar. AC3 or mp3 for the audio stream. A GB per hour will give very good results - never rush when encoding video - always multi pass vbr.

 
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cucc Paul

Guest
Thanks for the hints. Decided on using divx for compression 1.2GB per hour ish using double pass encryption and using mp3 on the audio side. Most people now have codex for this and if not they should, Its also supported by not only divx player but realplayer and quicktime. Ive found  server side software (opensource) that with some tweaking will work well for streaming video as well as creating quite a nice front end, think google video and it will be similar just we will have greater control over settings etc that google doesnt allow for. As for downloads we (me and several computer scientists/friends who know scarry amounts of stuff and have too much spare time) concluded that bittorent although ideal would probably not have enough nodes to create fast download speeds due to the limited size of the caving community. I think were opting for a ftp style system instead which will intigrate into a website. Similar to web based ftp used for uploading websites eg, the one used by www.streamline.net just ours will be a download rather than an upload. Size of project now dawning on us  :cry: but we'll get there  ;). New pet project for when I cant cave.
 
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