Need to convert video…

Recently, I took on a side project for one of my web site hosting customers.  It involved converting videos that he had taken to a web viewable format.  Admittedly, I am a novice in this area but I took on the challenge so I’d learn something new.

Here was the challenge:

1. Convert these files to a format that we could stream without downloading the entire file first.
2. Find a place on the web to hold many many hours of video.
3. Perform the research necessary to give him an idea of cost associated with streaming these videos.
4. Keep the files as small as possible due to items 2 and 3 above.  
5. Maintain sanity on this project which I knew nothing about.

So I started with a DVD that looked like this.

It played fine in my PowerDVD player loaded on my machine.  But I needed to rip it to a more standard format. I chose to use a product called Handbrake to allow me to convert it to MP4 format.  This is quite standard and streamable, but they are huge! The example above settled out at about 1.6 gigabytes.

So at least it’s ripped now but too large,  I then use a product called Super © to convert to FLV format.  Flash Video is even MORE standard that MP4, is much smaller and won’t take up so much space on the host servers (which mean cheaper!).

After conversion, the files are now only 280 megabytes or so.  The space savings is about 80% over MP4.

I found a SWF player to play the FLV videos. Check out FlowPlayer 3.1.

So, we have items 1 and 4 above covered.

To keep this blog reasonably short, I’ll cut to the chase.

1. There should be an easier way to convert straight to FLV from a DVD.  Someone out there knows that way! Please share it.
2. I settled on using Rackspace’s partnership with Limelight to provide the cloud storage and streaming. They have a great system but I have had quite a bit of problems getting the files uploaded.  They eventually work but with lots of errors.
3. Cost is relative to the amount of folks watching.  We’re still discovering all the hidden costs.
4. I am not aware of a format smaller than this.  Anyone?
5. Not sure I ever had sanity.  This one whipped me and I’m sure I’m not efficient enough on it.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to grow and be like Ian Beyer! He’s the king of Live Streaming on a Budget!

If anyone wants more details, I’ll be glad to answer them as best as I can.