Playing/Embedding MP4 Videos in Web Pages?

[sm9]

Hi there,

I've got a dozen mp4 videos (640 x 480) that I want to embed on some web pages, but I've never really dabbled with videos before so don't have much of a clue.

I want to host them on my own server rather than on a third party host, and they'll also be in a password protected members only area.

The best I could do was to convert them to Flash files and play them in some free flash FLV player.

But I heard that I should be able to play the mp4 videos in a player without converting them to flash, but I couldn't figure out how?

Any tips on this would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Ste

[Dynamite]

Divx Web Player is supposed to be quite a good and easy option for embedding video into websites.

Not done it myself, but it looks pretty straight forward....

Click here for guide

[wiiksie]

Just create a quicktime object in your html mate, and then configure the source parameter to match the filename of your video.

Something like this:

<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" WIDTH="480"HEIGHT="272" CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
<PARAM name="SRC" VALUE="videos/MyVideo.MP4">
<PARAM name="AUTOPLAY" VALUE="true">
<PARAM name="CONTROLLER" VALUE="true">
<EMBED SRC="videos/MyVideo.MP4" WIDTH="480" HEIGHT="272" AUTOPLAY="true" CONTROLLER="true" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"></EMBED>
</OBJECT>

You'll need to provide information on how to download quicktime etc if the visitor doesn't have it, but this is the quickest way of providing Mp4 vids via html.

Flash video is much nicer (most people have the Flash player and its a highly compressed format), but that will obviously involve some recoding on your part.

[Thants]

Don't ask me!

[sm9]

Thanks Dynamite and Wiiksie. And Thants too!

The DivX page looks great, but I know from experience that not many people have the player so would rather steer clear of this if possible.

The QuickTime options looks okay so I'll try that. I thought I read somewhere ages ago that Google were re-coding all the YouTube videos from Flash into MP4, and that the latest flash player would play MP4 files? I'll have to give that a go.

My previous effort was to embed a video, but that meant all 70mb (or whatever size it was) had to be downloaded first which wasn't ideal!

Thanks,

Ste