Serving WMV on a drupal site?

Question

I have a WMV file that I need to host on my drupal 6.13 site (on ubuntu 9.x). Is a there a relatively painless way to do this.

Do I need the "Video" module to do this? Or can I just install a video player and point my WMV file to it?

My other concern is the user should be able to view this video on my site without needing to download anything, is WMV the appropriate format? I am worry about people viewing this on the mac and ios device. Should I convert this to another format first?

Can I do all of the above with free software alone?

Thank a lot.

Answer 1

The de-facto standard, especially if you want to target iOS devices, is H.264: WMV is not going to cut it. Most Flash-based players (which you'll need for browsers like IE and Firefox that do not support H.264) also support H.264 video.

From a site administration standpoint, you'll need to either prevent users from uploading non H.264 video, or transcode the files once uploaded. This is not a trivial task, and you should use a contributed module for this. Video is probably the most far along in providing a turnkey video hosting solution.

There is also Kaltura, but it's a commercial service and they have historically failed to address privacy issues despite repeated warnings. There's a new maintainer in charge of the module, independent of the company, and the module may be safer to use than in the past.