Playing video on a dynamic website

Question

Hi I am currently designing a website for a client - the site will be written in asp.net with a cms built in. My client has come back saying he wants to play mp4s on the site - plus being able to embed some other videos from youtube, vimeo etc.... in his blog - I have managed to convice my client that playing .flv would be better for obvious reasons (which he has agreed is OK). but when I went back to my coder, he said that because of the fact its a dynamic site that it will take 2 days to get this working (in terms of creating the mechanics to allow my client to up load his movies etc.....)

Is this correct - as my client is under the impression that it should be a simple thing to do - while my coder tells me that its not that simple.

I am in the middle of all of this - can you help please!!!!

Answer 1

At the end of the day only the coder you are using knows exactly how much effort is required here. You have to trust them. This almost certainly not trivial. Make sure you and the coder understand exactly what's being asked for here and that neither of you are assuming anything about how the client expects it to work.

Answer 2

Is your client a programmer? Non-programmers should never dictate how long a programming task should take.

If you're cowboy coding without testing "today" would probably suffice, but any sane and professional development shop would never let this happen.

Now let's clarify what your client really told you to do:

Your dev seems to be assuming that he has to support adding/uploading videos from your CMS.

If your dev is going to use a 3rd party API like YouTube, 2 sounds reasonable. If you're going to serve it on your own site, it'd take at least a week's worth of programming to make sure your site can take such a heavy load of streaming data -- it's stupid, not to mention highly irresponsible, to assume it could be worked out in a day.

Now, if you're client is only really talking about embedding videos in blog entries or articles, that's a very trivial task: YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites already supply the HTML embed code that's needed to display a video on a page. In fact that's a zero effort task assuming that your blog entry editor properly parses the embed code, or has an Edit HTML feature.

So, which one is which?

Answer 3

This might be a good occasion to use the <video> tags. It might simplify things at the cost of only supporting users with recent browsers.

Answer 4

Two days is a quite optimistic estimate for all that you've mentioned. Maybe for embedding YouTube videos only, but for upload/storage/streaming of videos on the local server it's a different thing entirely.

But if you don't understand programming yourself, then you have to trust the expert that you've hired to do the job for you, and you have to tell the client that is how long it will take. The fact is that these things aren't trivial to write, there's the front end website management interface that needs creating, and the back end server software that manages what to do with the uploaded file. Never mind integration and making sure it's easy for the client to run a workflow of upload file, incorporate that video inside some content in the CMS, and so on.

Answer 5

I just recently did this, you need to get videoLan http://www.videolan.org/

This streams mostly anything, after you set up a streaming site it's easy!