Video Hosting Suggestions?
 

I run a membership based site, can anyone suggest a good video host that'll work with adult content? Also, while I am knowledgeable in the more basic web languages(html/css/php/etc.), I know nothing about servers or anything too complex. How difficult is it to stream videos from the host onto my server? Is there anything in particular I need to know, or is it as simple as embedding a YouTube video? Further more, will the fact that the content is membership protected affect my streaming capabilities? Not sure if it is important or not, but I rent hosting from Host Gator and I believe the use Apache.

You mean "host" as in some sort of file depository like AmazonS3? Why wouldn't you just upload and stream from your own server instead of making things more complicated? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at... I am getting tired.

See my sig if you need a better host.

What is the main country you would like to host for.

Currently we hosting the videostreams of dutch adult sites as live events of the nr1. DJ of the world.
We can provide the encoding as well adding DRM to your streams. In any streaming format you liked.

Thanks for the suggestion, but the reason I was looking into separate video hosting was to cut down on bandwidth and because I'm on a shared server. Also, I've tried hosting them on my own but the buffering time was ridiculous. However, this may have been do to the file I was using since it was a WMV.

In all honesty, video on webpages is a foreign subject to me. I've heard FLV is the way to go, but my server wont allow streaming FLVs unless I use VPS or rent a dedicated server. If there Is any other alternatives, I'd appreciate any input! :)

To simplify, what is a user friendly way to incorporate video onto my site?

if you need some space let me know i have my own dedicaed server dual xenon wiuth 16 gb memory and 2 1 tb drives and a 1 tb backup drive

it has ffmeg plugins

you upload raw video and video gets encoded in various formats , then you link those videos in your site or some other place you can even restrict access to specific videos.


is this are you looking for ?

last time i checked those were pretty expensive.

cant recall the service name .

In all honesty, video on webpages is a foreign subject to me. I've heard FLV is the way to go, but my server wont allow streaming FLVs unless I use VPS or rent a dedicated server. If there Is any other alternatives, I'd appreciate any input!


FLV is just a format, a suggestion is a good video converting system. Think about Wowza or Red5 to stream. Streaming of content should be done over the streaming protocol for best effect instead of putting it over port 80 of the webserver. Feel free to chat further sent a mail [email protected].

I've been looking into this for a membership site I am setting up - If you read this informative Thread started by Borked you should get yourself some answers.

gfy.com forward slash showthread.php?t=990150

(sorry can't post links yet)

You may also want to look at a CDN or a Video on Demand provider.
Shameless Plug and Demo: http://www.hostedinvegas.com/video/video-on-demand/

Anthony

Hi, some hosting companies that come to my mind are webair.com, mojohost.com, leaseweb.com, isprime.com, choopa.com and nationalnet.com. Not all of them offer VPS packages, you should check. But I'm sure you can find some entry level VPS with enough bandwidth for a reasonable price.

One cost effective solution to get you started, is to get a VPS setup with nginx using the http mp4 module, or lighttpd with the codeshop h264 module (license required for commercial use). Those webservers are lightweight and allow for a simple pseudo-streaming setup.

To feed your webservers with video, you will need to prepare the video specially for the purposes. The correct conversion settings and specially the bitrate and keyframe interval will affect how your video is played and the ability to seek the video by your visitors. Our video transcoding application, Tremendum Transcoder, is very easy to use, has a set of default profiles which are suitable for this purpose, and also includes HTML5 video profiles.

A correctly setup web server will also allow range-request, so the visitors playing back using html5 capable browsers instead of flash player will also be able to skip to parts of the video without needing to buffer the whole file. That's important to save on your bandwidth bill ;-)

Once you got your media ready, you will need a good video player. Two good choices are FlowPlayer (flowplayer.org) and JWplayer (longtailvideo.com). These players in their latest versions support html5 and flash playback integrated seamlessly, and make it easy to deliver video to a broader audience.

Awesome! Thanks for the informative reply!