Add video to web page

How to host the video

If you want to add video to your web page you can either use a video sharing site like YouTube or you can host the video files on your server. To give web visitors a quick preview of the video content you should also create a preview thumbnails page with captured video frames.

Using a video sharing site

Using a video sharing site for hosting is probably the easiest way to go. You simply upload your file to the video sharing site and use the provided HTML code.

Uploading a video to youtube

When you are using a video sharing site you also get the added benefit of viewers from the actual video sharing site. The downside is that you don’t have the same control over the quality of the video. A video created for a video sharing site should have good quality when uploaded and be in either AVI or MPEG format. When the video is uploaded to the site I will be converted to Flash video format and will get reduced quality. If the video has bad quality to start with the result will be double worse.

Hosting the video yourself

If you host the video files yourself you have full control over quality. You can a use a higher quality for your videos and get a more professional look. The downside is that you now pay for the bandwidth yourself which can be an issue if your video gets very popular. On the other hand you can simply change to use a video sharing site later.

Video formats

If you are going to host the video files yourself you need to decide on what format to use. The most common formats are Flash video, Windows media, Real media and QuickTime. All video foramts has their own web plug-in and all has their advantages and disadvantages. Today almost all videos put out on the web are in Flash video format since almost everyone has the Flash plug-in installed.

Presenting your video

When you add video to your web page you want to have a video thumbnail gallery to give visitors a quick overview. You want this regardless if you use a video sharing site or host the videos yourself. With videos a gallery is even more important than for photos since videos have time dimension and you can not seek at random in a streamed web video, even seeking in a local video takes time. Video frames are usually not as high resolution as most photos are today. You can simply use video frames right away without resizing and visitors will get a preview of the actual video frame size. The number of frames you want to preview depends on how long your video clip is, for very short clips it is perhaps enough with one frame from the middle of the video.

Capturing video frames

To capture video frames using Fast video indexer start the program and add you video files to it.

Fast video indexer video capture software

Check the option page to make sure its set to generate a web page and then start capturing. Fast video indexer will extract video frames taken a few seconds apart and generate a web page. Next select the video to get a list of all video frames and right click to delete frames you do not want. When you are finished open up the generated web page in your html editor and customize it to match your sites look and feel. If you are regularly adding videos to your site you can change the template used by Fast video indexer to generate html pages.
It is not hard to add video to a web page and now you have a good start for futher research

Resources

You tube video sharing site
Fast video indexer homepage
Video capture software download page

Video knowledgebase

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