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Streaming Video (similar to Youtube)

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FShoppe

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Hello all,

FileShoppe.net is a type of file host but we are looing to expand our service into streaming video and 'image hosting'.

The image hosting side is easy, so no help required there.

What we are interested in taking existing files that have already been uploaded, such as .avi/mp4/mpeg files and converting them so they can be streamed over the site in flv format.

Processing videos and streaming is not somthing we have much experience in so any suggestions as to where to get started would be appreciated.

FYI, we are not looking for a new/seperate system. The current method of upload and link generation should remain the same. But if there is some pre-written 3rd party opensource software out there, perhaps we could study it.
 
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FileShoppe is a in house developed peice of software. We used no outside code what so ever. We have never even looked at the xfilesharingpro script :)
 
I'd suggest you forget about .flv and convert to either mp4, h.264, webm or ogg where needed. The transcoding itself should be fairly straight forward if you use ffmpeg. I don't have any experience with streaming but I THINK that once you have converted the videos all you need is a Flash player or just HTML5's video tag depending on on the format you convert to. Good load balancing very important too I assume.
 
Load balancing should not be a problem for us.

It is merely a matter of processing the videos to a streamable format and providing a decent player that would work out of the box.

I was unaware that flash video players existed for non flv format videos.
 
Flash itself supports multiple video formats. YT streams mostly h.264 in an mp4 container to its Flash player. Flv is crap quality wise and was introduced in a time when broadband was still new. It's a legacy format.
 
It is also not our intention to provide 'super high quality' video.

For free streams, our main concern is speed.

We would most likley look to compress the file a great deal. It is likley we would convert a 100MB DivX encoded avi file to a 50MB (or smaller) file that can be streamed over a flash player.

The idea being to save bandwidth. Ideally the stream would be sub around 750kbps or less.

---------- Post added at 02:43 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:41 PM ----------
Flash itself supports multiple video formats. YT streams mostly h.264 in an mp4 container to its Flash player.
Click to expand...

Interesting. So with some video conversion software, it should be a simple matter of embedding the player and pointing to the location of the file to stream?

That being said, the location of the streaming video file could be input into a desktop client such as VLC media player, and the same content streamed there also?
 
Afiak, all formats I named offer better quality at any given bitrate over flv. So whether you go for quality or not is kinda irrelevant. Not sure about encoding performance though.

edit:

FShoppe said:
Interesting. So with some video conversion software, it should be a simple matter of embedding the player and pointing to the location of the file to stream?
Click to expand...

Yup. There are free Flash players out there you can embed in to a web page that let you set the location of the video/music to be played. What counts is that the target file format is streamable and that it is supported by Flash. So avi wouldn't work for example.

FShoppe said:
That being said, the location of the streaming video file could be input into a desktop client such as VLC media player, and the same content streamed there also?
Click to expand...

Yes, assuming you give it a direct link to the video and not the web page ofc.
 
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I think VP8 (WebM container) should be natively supported on all browsers with HTML5 video playback support. So no extra effort is required there from your end. Not sure how it stands against the other codecs in terms of the final size.
 
I recommend using MP4 and WebM.
MP4 is supported by all major browsers and WebM is set to become the new defacto in the coming years I hope.

If you use MP4 and an HTML5 player (with a fallback to a flash player for unsupported browsers), then your videos will be streamable to mobile devices as well, something lacking from current file hosting sites with video streaming. In addition MP4 files become relatively small when converted from avi's and such. Example I convert a video on my desktop from a 1.5GB avi to a 121MB MP4.
 
Very interesting. Sounds like video streaming integration will be easier than first anticipated.. Still much to do.

A player is one thing, automated encoding of video files is another.
 
snowmanrene said:
I recommend using MP4 and WebM.
MP4 is supported by all major browsers and WebM is set to become the new defacto in the coming years I hope.

If you use MP4 and an HTML5 player (with a fallback to a flash player for unsupported browsers), then your videos will be streamable to mobile devices as well, something lacking from current file hosting sites with video streaming. In addition MP4 files become relatively small when converted from avi's and such. Example I convert a video on my desktop from a 1.5GB avi to a 121MB MP4.
Click to expand...

I think you're confusing codecs with container formats.
 
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