Hello! Currently I have a static html/css website that I want to build a backend onto in order to upload high quality videos to the site. I'm not entirely sure how I might go about doing this.......suggestions for implementations, language to use etc. would be greatly appreciated.
I have no constraints aside from of course, spending millions of pounds......I plan to do this myself too.
Any web application language will do, PHP is the easiest one to learn, because its really html with html generator.
I would run with Coldfusion:
As for a database, I would install the CF server locally, and point it at a local Access database for testing (assuming you don't have MySQL or any other DB available to you). As for implementation . . . well that is really up to what you want to do. I will throw out that if you host this in production, you will find that your bandwidth will be used up faster as movies can get to be rather large.
Handling video uploads is difficult. You have to keep connections open for a long time, then transcode the video (to FLV if you want a YouTube-style site), the store the video, then stream it back to users, all which takes up a lot of CPU, disk space, bandwidth.
Developing all of that from scratch would take a lot of effort.
If you want an out-of-the-box video upload feature I would look at the various video modules for the major CMS's (like this one for Drupal).
You could also integrate with a site like YouTube, using YouTube to upload and stream the video (there's also a Drupal module for that). There are also commercial services like VitalStream which will handle video uploading for you (via an iframe).
if you are ready to learn new stuff I would recommend using PHP/MYSQL with a file uploader like the one included in tinyMCE, the license cost about 60$ I think, once the video is uploaded you can work on it via the PHP plugin FFMPEG installed on many host.
FFMPEG allow you to convert the video format and also to create thumbnail of the video automatically.
You can view those site for reference / license
If you prefer not to learn new language / use database server, you should go with the youtube embedding system which is quite simple. You can view help about the youtube embedding system by typing "youtube embed" on Google.