This was the little question that was popped to us by one of our recent clients which held quite a big answer. So let's find out how a web site can feature videos and what the basic requirements are for a project like this.
First and foremost, you need a webserver to host a website as mentioned in my post earlier. However, when you are considering featuring videos on your website, you need to think about leasing a web server that can stream videos. The reason being that when you start a video in the end user's browser, it should start playing immediately while it is still downloading. This is exactly what happens when you view a video on youtube. All in all, the process of making a video play while it is still downloading is called video streaming. If a web server does not support this particular feature, then the video will not start playing in the browser until the complete file has been downloaded to the end user's computer.
There is however a very effective alternative to this. When featuring streaming videos companies normally use video formats like mp4 or quick time. When recently contacted by a client who expressed that he wanted to stream videos but did not wish to invest in an expensive server that could stream we offered this method to him. We used a video format called as flv which stands for flash video.
What we did was we generated a flash video player and embedded it into the page where these videos were to be featured and then instructed the flash player to download the flv files from the server. The result was amazing and flv files streamed without using a video streaming web server thus saving money for our client.
Here's how we have been able to achieve this: You2CanCook.com. Do not forget to see the fantastic visual effects we have been able to generate courtesy of an application called multibox here: You2CanCook.com/products.asp.
It is also possible however to call youtube videos on your own website and we can certainly achieve the same effect as the recipes online page as on the website above using the multibox application.
