Embedding Videos on Your Website

Many websites offer streaming video content. This is nothing new. What is new, is that there are many options for getting that accomplished. The days of RealPlayer vs. Quicktime vs. Windows Media are just about over. Now there are wide range of options, some that use Adobe Flash player and others that use open or proprietary video formats.

As with any offering you publish on your site, you want to make sure you can reach the widest possible audience and provide accessibility for those who need it. Hosting your own media server can be taxing on your system load, but there are some solutions that make it easy. I mentioned one open source solution in a previous post.

Another option is to sign up for remote video hosting. This could be as simple as a YouTube channel, which offers closed captioning and other accessibility features, or something more customized that requires monthly payments. At any rate, you will need to embed the videos on your site, and you will want to make sure the solution you choose will not slow it down. Some sites that have many embedded Flash videos, for example, run very slowly and take a long time to load, particularly on netbooks and other mobile devices. When HTML5 video becomes standard, it may be a better choice to consider.

Apple's open source streaming server

In a previous post, we learned about two streaming media servers, one proprietary (Shoutcast) and one open source (Icecast). But there are other free and open source media servers, and one worth noting is Darwin Streaming Server (DSS), which is based on Apple’s Quicktime Streaming Server (QTSS).

DSS supports RTP and RTSP streaming protocols and will stream both audio and video. It runs as a background service on your Mac OS X Server or Linux server and includes a convenient web-based control panel. You can create playlists, start and stop media, and configure ports for media distribution.

“Both DSS and QTSS are built on a core server that provides state of the art quality of service features with Skip protection and Instant-On, and support for the latest digital media standards, MPEG-4 and 3GPP.

Darwin Streaming Server is available as a free download under the Apple Public Source License.”

Source: Mac OS forge
Photo: Hexley.com