One of my friends asked me to review various options for embedding video into a website. In this brief article I will review the major embedded video providers like YouTube, Vimeo, and ReVVer and how you can use them with to enhance your website or application.
Thanks to the availability of high speed Internet, most people can view videos online. Using videos on your website is a great way to promote your business, cause, or product. It is more interactive than a static site and keeps people on the site longer, helping solidify your goals. In this review I’m going to compare the time it takes to prepare, upload, and include a video into this page for the three major video providers.
Equipment: For this exercise I’m using some footage from a Panasonic digital video camera and creative commons images and animation. I’ll then edit down to 30 seconds for the purposes of this review showing text, still images, video, music, and voice to demonstrate the quality of each.
Exporting: I created the video using iVideo, but you use the video editing program of your choosing. The export settings I used were MPEG4 using H.264 compression at 640x480VGA, 1800kbits/s, 30 fps, key frame every 15 frames, multi-pass encoding, 64kps audio at 44KHz Stereo. For about 30 seconds of video it produced a 5.5MB file.
- Uploading – Login in to your account. Select the yellow upload button in the top right. Select Video File. Upload the file and set the title and description.
- Viewing – Enter the video id after http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=.
- Embedding – Here is the code I used for the video below.
- Uploading – Log into your account. Select below Upload a video box. Select choose a file and Upload. Then enter details about the video. Once this is complete it will take about 5-15 minutes to convert your video.
- Viewing – View your video by entering the videos ID after http://www.vimeo.com/
- Embedding – The following code was used to embed this into this page:
365WebApps.com test video from Jason Wood on Vimeo.
365WebApps.com test video from Jason Wood on Vimeo.
- Uploading – Upload videos by clicking on the upload button in the upper right. Browser for the file and click upload. While the upload is being completed, enter the data on the right. ReVVer takes the longest, because they have affiliates who review your video and pair it with advertising.
- Viewing – http://revver.com/video/id/short-code
- Embedding – Paste the following javascript code into your web page
By using a public service for your video you also get the added benefit of viral marketing (others sharing links to your video) and you don’t have to pay for the bandwidth. The downside is you can quickly loose track of your intellectual property and your message may be crowed by other advertising. In these cases you may want to use a Content Delivery Network or CDN, which will be the topic of part II.