what's the current best way to put audio and video on a web site?

Question

I'm working on a very small site, with almost zero budget as a favor for a friend. She wants to put a short audio and video clip on the site (both clips are under two minutes). The audio is currently a 1.6 MB AAC (.m4a) and the video is a 30 MB H.264 (.mov).

What's the current best practice that's going to be the easiest for me, while still creating a good experience for the users? Should we upload the video to youtube or vimeo and embed? There's probably some simple audio player I could download. I have flash, so could make an FLV; I could convert the m4a to an mp3, etc. I could just link directly to the raw files....

Answer 1

Outsource it.

• Youtube
• Blip.tv (FAQ)
• Vimeo (Basics)

Many popular video sites use Blip.tv

• Thatguywiththeglasses
• Cinemassacre

And others use Youtube

• Screwattack

Answer 2

Uploading to a service like YouTube, Blip.tv, or Vimeo is good, but you'll have to settle for them tossing in "related videos" or other ads on your content, and you'll be forced to stick with their player/branding.

You could get the JW FLV Media Player, and play the .mov through flash. And actually, if you go with blip, they will host the file and give you the absolute path to the .flv itself - meaning you could load it directly into your local copy of JW FLV Player, and likely bypass their ads/related content.

Another nifty thing to consider would be the jQuery Media Player. It quickly converts markup/css into a media-player driven by the powerful jQuery framework. Using this with the free hosting provided by Blip.tv (who again give you direct access to your .flv files) would be a great solution too.

Answer 3

In terms of being modern and standards compliant for video embedding, Video for Everyone is probably the best way.

<!-- “Video for Everybody” by Kroc Camen <camendesign.com> cc-by -->
<video width="640" height="480" controls="controls">
    <source src="__MY_VIDEO__.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
    <source src="__MY_VIDEO__.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
    <object width="640" height="500" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
     data="__FLASH_PLAYER__.swf" flashvars="file=__MY_VIDEO__.mp4"
    > <param name="movie" value="__FLASH_PLAYER_.swf" />
     <param name="flashvars" value="file=__MY_VIDEO__.mp4" />
     <!--[if gt IE 6]>
     <object width="640" height="495" classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B">
      <param name="src" value="__MY_VIDEO__.mp4" /><!
     [endif]--><!--[if gt IE 6]><!-->
     <object width="640" height="495" type="video/quicktime" data="__MY_VIDEO__.mp4"
     > <param name="src" value="__MY_VIDEO__.mp4" />
     <!--<![endif]--><p>
      <strong>No video playback capabilities detected.</strong>
      Why not try to download the file instead?<br />
      <a href="__MY_VIDEO__.mp4">MPEG4 / H.264 “.mp4” (Windows / Mac)</a> |
      <a href="__MY_VIDEO__.ogv">Ogg Theora &amp; Vorbis “.ogv” (Linux)</a>
     </p><!--[if gt IE 6]><!--></object><!--<![endif]-->
     <!--[if gt IE 6]></object><![endif]-->
    </object>
</video>

A fully commented version is available at the link above.

This uses the video tag if it's supported, but as Firefox and Safari both support different formats (Ogg and Mp4) you need to have a couple of different versions of the video files.

This works on every browser, from IE6 to the iPhone, and from Chrome to Opera including everything in between.

For audio, the audio tag is the most modern, though I'm not sure about browser support at the moment.

Answer 4

Hi,

for the video, I recommend to use youtube. you can embed into your pages without sacrificing spaces and bandwith.

For the sound, i would recommend to use mp3 (not aac since not everybody has aac) and then you can put flash mp3 player (try this : 5 best flash podcast players)

For mp3, if it is a speech or just human talking about something, you don't need to make stereo, mono is more than enough. You can edit using Audacity (free-open source software). I guest (from my past experience) 1 hour speech could be 5-6 MB mono mp3 (about 96Kbps if i am not wrong)

Answer 5

If you need webcam video recording for your project, you might use the Nimbb API, which offers a free developer account. This could be great to recording videos on the fly and not worry about the technical aspect of hosting or playing the videos.