Roll Your Own Embedded Video

Wow! It's been a long time since I have posted to this blog. Time gets away from a guy.

Regardless, I have been makings short films and learning tons of cool techniques just by doing it. There is no going back now.

One quick thing that I wanted to post was about the proliferation of embedded video and link through to a great way to roll your own.

Big conglomerate social media sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Revver, etc have really made embedded video commonplace on the internet. As a filmmaker with an online presence, it is expected that you will be using a similar feature on your website or blog.

Although sites like Youtube are great for quick one-up shorts and trailers (like Blogger is good for quick posting) it's nice to have the option of offering streaming content directly from your personal site. I know what you're thinking... "just embed your Youtube or Vimeo clip to your site cuz it's easy".

True, you can do that but... in most cases there will be watermarks or link-throughs to those very sites providing the stream or worse yet... ads. For me, I would perfer not to advertise for those big guys from my personal filmmaker page since that page is about me and only me (or my production company... no matter how small it may be).

There is a decent solution for this though and it goes by the name of JW Player.

Now there are two version, one for FLV and MP4 files and one for streaming WMV files based on Microsoft's Silveright.

Personally, I had no luck getting MP4 files to stream and any software that I have access to does a lousy job outputting to FLV so... I decided to give the Silverlight version a try. It streams wonderfully.

Now WMV and Microsoft are surely not my first choice by any means but it was so easy to impliment that I was sold (actually, it's all free as long as you have something that can convert your footage to WMV).

If you manage your own website, which most of us do, then embedding with JW is super easy. Just use the setup wizard on their website, copy and paste the code, upload your video file to your server, define the path and you are good to go.

If you want to delve deeper, you can also create skins and all that other bs as well.