Help With Video Settings and Placing on Web???

[Dan Williams]

I am new to videos and creating web pages. I just recently got engaged,
therefore thought it would be cool to put the video that was shot of it on
the web. I am currently using Roxio 7 and am on Comcast. I have a couple
of questions that I am hoping someone could help with or point me to a good
source as my search has not been very successful.

I have placed the video on the web server. Linking to that location
results in the video downloading and playing. How do you set up so it will
stream? What is the pros and cons of streaming a video? Do you have to
save in special format to make this possible?

What should you do to accommodate your dial-up users?

Roxio has a ton of different format settings to save the file in. What is
recommended for the web? Should you have a couple of different options
(high-speed and dial-up)? I understand the basic types... such as AVI,
MPEG-2 and WMV... but there are a number of Windows Media Video 8 in Roxio
followed by different kbps amount. Is this something special for streaming
or just means version 8 codec?

Side question... there are MPEG-2 settings in which frame size is slightly
bigger, but the frame per seconds is slightly less. Why would you want to
pick one over the other (320x288 25fps vs 320x240 29.97fps)? Is there
anywhere that really explains all the Roxio settings in which you can save
in?

 

[Mark Burns]

The general rule for placing video on the WEB is to make it short,
short, short, and to the point.

For this discussion here, I will assume that be streaming video that
you mean real time playing on one computer from a server computer.

Streaming video requires cooperating computers at each end to send and
receive video/audio signals. For example, using a web cam, one
computer is sending data to the receiving computer, and in turn
becoming the recieving and sending computers. This is simple for point
to point.

For a server situation, the host server must be sending a/v frames from
itself to the client computer, generally via a web browser. There is
no standard for this built into all web browsers however, this is done
with ActiveX or Java run time software on the client and host
computers. This predisposes the need for understanding the nature of
your client, ability to install software from the server, etc... Too
much of a hassle unless one is selling the Naked News or something like
that. Most use dedicated servers for this.

Much better for the rest of us to use small mpeg files. In the case of
a wedding video, I would suggest things like the bridal walk, vows,
cutting the wedding cake, grooms toast, father daughter dance each on a
short 1-2 min video. WEB viewers will really like that better, imho.

Also consider taking the still photos and putting them to music into a
2-3 minute mpeg video looks great. If you have enough for 4-6 min,
make two videos. Be careful of copyright here on the music, as you
will be a broadcaster. The video will be well compressed, as there
will only be about 2 I-frame's per second. I generally use a four
second display.

I use 352X240 @29.97 fps. Keep it small for quick download. For the
web, it really doesn't matter as long as you keep the aspect ratio
comparable. The PAL standard is 25 fps, the NTSC is 29.97. The
reason for these differences has to do with their broadcast history's,
not that one is better or worse than the other. As far as I know, all
PC's play both standards well.

I also use Womble mpeg-vcr to recode my DVD 720x480 videos to the
352x240 size. One should use mpeg-2 with a 4000 max vbr and 192 mpa
audio sampling.

AVI should be used for embedded mpeg files. (Remember that AVI is just
a container. It can contain mpeg-2). I generally just use mpeg-2
files referenced that play in whatever the user has referenced to mpeg.
On my computer it is Windows Media Player. It used to be Real Player.
Six of one, ...

Cheers and congratulations...

..