Movies: Selected Short Videos
YouTube Channel
YouTube, of course, is the best known online video platform. On the positive side, YouTube allows you to create a free account that allows storage of videos. Also, most people are aware of YouTube and you can get a lot of views from people searching for videos like yours. Unfortunately, YouTube displays ads and other videos.Vimeo
Vimeo was created as a response to YouTube. It allows you to have a limited Basic account. On the positive side, there are no ads like on YouTube. Unfortunately, Vimeo is less well known and the Basic account has limitations. Paying for an account eliminates these limitations which is the trade-off for no ads.Kaptiwa
Kaptiwa is only one example of a paid service that mimics YouTube without the ads and other videos. The drawback is that these services are not as well known and only people who are on your website are likely to see the.JWPlayer
A company called JW Player an online video platform called JWPlayer. It allows you to upload 1 GB of videos and stream 5 GB per month. This is enough for the casual user but paid account are available. After uploading the videos you can publish them separately or create a play list. If you tag the videos, you can create dynamic playlists that change as you upload more videos. You can then publish the playlist with your choice of players. The players can be configured in many different ways. To publish the videos the site produces a single line of code you can paste anywhere on your page.EasyHTML 5 Video
HTML5 is the current version of the language behind all web design. The standard is constantly being updated but it is always stable. I wanted to experiment with hosting my own videos so that I did not have to depend on other services like YouTube. I came across a program called EasyHTML5 Video and decided to give it a try. The program is free for personal use but places a small logo on the video. Since the free version worked well, I purchased a license for unlimited websites. The program allows drag and drop conversion of one video at a time and produces several different formats. It does not produce a playlist but generates a separate page for each video. I was able to rename some files and display the player in an iframe with an HTML "playlist" with links. I wrapped the whole thing in a table and it seems to work well.I hope that you can view the above videos of a few of my hiking trips. There may be more soon. Getting these videos up and running seemed like it would be an easy task. It turned out to be an education in the different formats of video on the web and how they can be displayed.
My requirements were to be able to display the videos so that many different people with many different browsers and many different computers could view them. I wanted the viewer to be able to easily pick from a list of videos. I also wanted them to be able to control the video. Of course, I wanted to do all this for FREE. I was willing to spend a little extra time to be able to post them at no cost.
The first step was to take some videos with my point-and-shoot camera. This is very easy to do. I downloaded the videos to my computer without a problem. The videos are in MOV format which is a format developed by Apple and is playable with their Quicktime player and several other free players. The player can be stand alone on your computer but there is also a plug-in for most browsers. I found out that Jalbum will create albums of videos as well as still images. I fired up Jalbum and created an album with three MOV videos. JAlbum is constantly updated and seems to work well with most common video formats.
I am still experimenting with the best size for the videos, the information in the playlist and the various HTML tags that can be used to display the player.