Web Streaming Media Server

So I'm not a web guy, but I'm stuck with putting these videos online. They want something like youtube -- really simple. A play button, fast forwards, etc. So I've been trying to find something to do this with flash.

I can convert the videos to flash, but I can't figure out how to embed these effectively in a web page with a video player similar to youtube's. Googling for this stuff seems to result in a lot of unprofessional utilties, toolbars, and buggy programs.

I've been using wimpy rave player, but there are a lot of videos and I'm doing this manually. Does anyone know of a lightweight database app where I can upload videos and it will generate the player in the browser so I'm not hard-coding HTML?

Edit: BTW I'm avoiding adobe's streaming server and really dont understand how Wowza works, as it seems overly complex.

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Comments

earweed

Have you looked into using windows media services (Part of Server 200

? I'm not sure how you would be incorporating it but it may help.

rwmidl

What about having a corporate account with YouTube and just hosting that way?

Forsaken_GA

well, it all depends on what you want.

You don't need adobe fms or Wowza if all you want to do is video, those are necessary for flash apps (ie, a flash based chat), and pretty much guarantees you're going to be doing some coding.

If you actually want to be able to stream videos (ie, click at any point in the video and it starts playing from there, as opposed to progressive which downloads it and then lets you click around in the downloaded portion), it gets a little more complicated. The easiest way I've ever found to do it is with lighttpd and it's mod_flv_streaming module.

If you don't care about actual streaming, then all you need is a flash player, which is a small flash app. You can either code one yourself, or you can use something like Flowplayer. But you're still going to be writing the HTML code for the embed yourself.

There are php based scripts that theoretically handle all of this for you. osTube, Clipshare, PHPMotion... but you really need to have someone who knows what they're doing on the server side to make them go. They invariably require ffmpeg compiled against various libraries, and that can be an adventure in and of itself, not to mention getting all of the codecs straight, oh and lets not forget the various php modules.

Unfortunately, this stuff isn't 'simple' and requires a little bit of sysadmin and coding skill if you're going entirely the do it yourself route. There's a reason why alot of folks simply upload it to Youtube and then use the embed code that youtube provides to actually share it

I used to deal with this crap all of the time. It was bad enough when it was just flash, but now everyone also wants h264 for streaming to the iPhone /sigh

hypnotoad

Well, thanks for the input. This is way harder than it should be. We're a windows shop so I guess I'll stick to writing HTML.

Forsaken_GA

you're telling me, man. Making servers able to support that crap was one of my least favorite parts of being a sysadmin