Problems uploading video files

The Black Oil

Hey,

A colleague in work wants me to put video clips on our website and I'm having a little trouble doing so. Pictures and documents can go up no problem, but that's a different area in the behind the scenes editing section of the site - maybe that's why.

My colleague (and a few others) wants to use this in conjunction with teachers for school talks. My concern there is the variation in IT equipment in schools and trying to get a file that will play in each situation is going to be an issue. It's not practical to bring a laptop in each instance hence putting it online. However, I figure that some schools won't have browsers or people knowledgeable enough that can play the file.

Anyway, initially she sent me a short .avi clip (3.5MB), which I uploaded to our site, but this didn't work - I get 'page not found' message. As it happens, she said it plays on her laptop, but not her workstation - this is playing as a standalone file, just from the folder - not via a url. I figure this probably a codec issue between her machines, yeah? It plays for me in VLC.

I then changed it (using Handbrake) to a .m4v file and that uploaded and played successfully for me, but not for her. Am wary of .m4v because it's not a very widespread format, OK, it is a bit I suppose, but I figure it will cause problems. I have .mov format, but I can't really upload it as it's over a GB and would take forever to play, however, another version is around 170MB. The clip's only about 5 minutes.

I don't know where I'm going wrong. It usually ends up as something like www.blahblahdomain.ie/uploads/files/blog/ClipA_.avi but won't play.

We would also like to upload the preview version of the clip and make viewable to anyone whilst making the full edition password protected so as not to spoil the topic by people seeing it in full before we visit the school. I don't know how to implement this and I don't want to give anyone and everyone admin access to our site.

Any ideas?

yoyo

You can use JW Player to play flash/h264 videos in a web browser without needing to rely on computers having plugins installed. To password protect access to the videos you would need to see if your websites CMS supports access control levels or even password protecting pages (I think Wordpress supports password protected pages out of the box, other CMS's may have plugins to add such functionality)

Nick

The Black Oil

Thanks, yoyo - I'm not sure that's the solution for us.

The site's not built on Wordpress - I don't know where to check re CMS.
Still hitting a brick wall with the video files.

yoyo

The Black Oil wrote: »

Thanks, yoyo - I'm not sure that's the solution for us.

The site's not built on Wordpress - I don't know where to check re CMS.
Still hitting a brick wall with the video files.

Joomla? Its hard to know what it uses, theres hundreds of CMS's out there, if you PM me the site I may be able identify it. You will need to integrate a player solution (generally a flash/html5 combo script) and it will play your videos if they are encoded right. Some CMS's may support addons to make this process easier, I don't really know though.
Is uploading to youtube and embedding out of the question? I think you can hide youtube video links so only people with the link can view them?
I'll move this over to development which would better suit the question tbh

Nick

BrokenArrows

Why not just put it on YouTube and use the embedded player?

You can set it to be unlisted so people without the link can't see it.

You could also upload your preview files which you could make listed.

The Black Oil

Not Joomla, heh, have used it a little in another job, but no here.

There is an option to embed a Youtube video alright - we're not on it for a couple of reasons, but I don't think we've ruled it out. However, even if we got on board YT, many schools block it for obvious reasons, so it probably wouldn't help to be on there.


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Here's what I see in the admin panel.

Home › Resources › Multimedia Downloads ›

Then, Title, Description, Category, Embed video, File (Choose File where I upload), Link - Further info link, Image (choose file), and 'is active', which has a check in the box.