Hosting Your Own MP4 Videos on Your Own Website

[Lin Evans]

I posted this here rather than on the DVD-Video AVI, Video Builder section because it may be of interest to all PTE users.

A short time ago there was a discussion about whether or not it would be possible to spool high resolution MP4's from one's own website rather than posting them on Vimeo or Youtube. As those of you who have used Vimeo and Youtube may be aware, your uploaded MP4 high resolution files are converted to Flash. Even though Flash does an admirable job of displaying still images in high resolution, transitions and animations are less than stellar. In any event, the quality on Vimeo as well as on Youtube is very, very good in terms of the still image but the MP4 rendition is "much" better in terms of many of the transitions as well as simple fades. Another consideration is that many want their presentations to be available only to those whom they decide to send links rather than widely available as they are on these hosts. Yes, you "can" have private links on Vimeo and perhaps Youtube and you do have the options of preventing download of the original files but there are numerous utilities which allow any viewer who has access to your shows the ability to download them whether you like it or not. Obviously this is also true of shows hosted on your own site, but you have greater control over who sees them if you control the server.

A thorough search of present technology turned up a new and exciting player developed and marketed by Josh Anderson. This player has some amazing capabilities including the ability to spool MP4's which are encoded with the h.264 codec. After some email conversations with Josh, it was determined that his player could spool our MP4 and can support the HD resolutions we want. This means that by using his "Transparent Player" we can host our MP4's in whatever resolution we choose on our own websites!

I invited Josh to visit our forum and see what we were up to and perhaps tell us more about his player. The Transparent Player actually does much, much more than just spool MP4's and I would suggest to anyone who is interested in perhaps pursuing this to visit Josh's website to learn all the details. Though his primary market is businesses who want to present small, concise messaging using such techniques as Chroma Key alpha channel videos where the subject with a transparent background appears to "float" above any text or images, I believe our AV enthusiasts may offer a niche market which will certainly grow in the future. Josh's solution is relatively inexpensive as business solutions go, and if you license his player now, it is available as a lifetime license and within the budget of anyone who is "serious" about hosting their own shows. I personally intend to purchase his player and host my own shows on my own site just as soon as I can scrape up the funds to proceed.

Here's a link to Josh's site. I would suggest going there and reading up on this exciting new technology! Be sure to turn up your sound. Just place your cursor over the active video and you will see the controls.

http://transparentplayer.com/

Best regards,

Lin

[Picsel]

Hello Lin

some other consideration (to date 16/01/2009)

- PTE Deluxe 75€

- (*) Pinnacle Studio Plus V12 around 73€

- (*) Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinium around 72€

- (*) Magix Video deluxe 15 Plus around 100€

(*) all supporting AVCHD

and transparentplayer 119USD (only video player !)

Where is the mistake?????

Best regards

Daniel

[Lin Evans]

Hi Daniel,

I don't understand - is there a question? PTE, Pinnacle, Vegas, Magix, and other software support AVCHD but these are not and do not contain web "players".

You can't use these above programs to stream video from your website. Transparent Player streams Flash and MP4 h.264 among other formats. Transparent Player doesn't allow you to "create" content. These are different processes.

Lin

[deskjet1uk]

Hi Lin,

I love this program, its tempting, I really think I would like this on my own website but before parting with any money, to your knowledge, is there anything else around that we should consider that comes anywhere near what this has to offer. I value your opinion greatly, thanking you in advance.

Ralph

[mhwarner]

Wow! This is pretty amazing! I am on a satellite internet connection and as I watched the videos on Josh's page, I had absolutely none of the jerkiness and stuttering that I usually experience with YouTube or Vimeo (or any other online videos) while waiting for the videos to load. I am impressed. I have been toying with the idea of putting some small slideshows out there, but I have been reluctant to do so without the control I would have when placing them on my own website. I think I might just purchase it -- and the lifetime license (like we have with PTE) sounds quite appealing.

Thanks for sharing this info, Lin.

[mhwarner]

Quick question, Lin.

If one were to purchase this transparent player product, would it be necessary to purchase any other programs to optimize videos (to obtain the results available on Josh's website (no jerkiness or loading delays) or would we be able to do this using settings in the video creation piece of PTE? Or do you know?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Mary,

I really don't think the player has any effect on the load times, etc. Josh gets the extremely fast load times and smoothness via small Flash code. If you were to play an MP4 via the Transparent Player it will not run any smoother or load any faster than it does without the player. The only significant difference would be that it has preload and streaming so it's not necessary to wait until the entire file has downloaded before playback begins.

The samples on Josh's site are all Flash as far as I know. They are quite small in terms of load size and with this comes the speed and smoothness. As MP4 files get larger, the amount jerkiness increases. You may want to play the samples on Youtube which I have posted links to in order to get an idea of the possible in MP4 conversions to Flash. MP4 h.264 is "cleaner" than Flash as Flash is implemented on Youtube and Vimeo, but there is no appreciable difference in the smoothness of pans. By "cleaner" I mean image quality for motion is better and there is no "pulsing" such as you see with Flash on Youtube and Vimeo. I suspect much of the "pulsing" comes from the amount of compression used on these sites. They do this to greatly lower the file sizes.

For example, I just made a 360 degree circular pano which in executable form takes 2.6 megabytes at full resolution of about 768 vertical by pano width. When converted to an MP4 at 640x480 the file size is 159 megabytes. The pano runs for 190 seconds. This means 11,400 images of 640x480 are stored to furnish the 3 minutes 10 seconds at 60fps for the MP4. Only the one file is stored in the executable and the rest are created on the fly by PTE via the GPU. My point is that MP4 at h.264 can support this while Flash reduces the fps to ~30fps (29.97fps to be exact). So somewhat more "jerky" movement for certain types of animation are unavoidable and when you really compress the Flash files you get much worse quality with fades and other transitions as well. Low resolution, small size videos can look great with these constraints, but when the file and image size increases things don't do as well with either Flash or MP4.

I believe that MP4 at 1024x768 is still very smooth. Image quality is superb. It's "MUCH" better than 1024x768 in Flash conversion on Youtube. It's absolutely "excellent" in terms of smoothness at 640x480 and image quality is very good. Much better than Flash in my opinion when you consider transitions, animation "and" simple image quality. So the advantage of having Josh's Transparent Player as I see it, is to be able to stream MP4's of medium size when you have animations and to stream HD at up to 1600x1200 in amazing image quality when you have no animations but just want to display a slideshow of stills with incredible image quality and very good transitions from your own website.

Best regards,

Lin

[Lin Evans]

Hi Ralph,

You may want to read my reply to Mary above. I have not found anything else which streams h.264 MP4's so the bottom line is that if you want MP4 quality to be available for your viewers, the only alternative is the Transparent Player. The conversions from MP4 to Flash on Youtube and Vimeo degrade transitions and induce "pulsing" into the which are in some type of animation. For still images only, the Youtube and Vimeo Flash conversions of HD quality, especially 1080p and 1600x1200 (almost identical in resolution but different in aspect ratio) are great. Once you introduce animations and especially horizontal pans, you can't go above 1024x768 on Youtube and you simply can't get smooth animations and pans on Vimeo at all in HD. Youtube quality is not nearliy as good at 1024x768 HD as it is at 1600x1200 so you are left with either compromise in image quality or you must avoid animations.

With MP4 h.264 at 60fps you get excellent horizontal pans at 640x480 and excellent image quality as well. You get "almost" perfectly smooth horizontal pans at 1024x768 with MP4 h.264. So for the absolute "best" posible, having the Transparent Player on your own site offers presently the highest quality possible via the web in my opinion.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin,

I love this program, its tempting, I really think I would like this on my own website but before parting with any money, to your knowledge, is there anything else around that we should consider that comes anywhere near what this has to offer. I value your opinion greatly, thanking you in advance.

Ralph

[mhwarner]

Thanks for the explanation on the compression. But I am still confused about whether or not I need an additional piece of software to convert the MP4 h.264 output from PTE to FLV or is there a way to use this transparent player to directly play the MP4 h.264 file. Sorry for being so dense. And thanks in advance!

[Lin Evans]

Hi Mary,

The Transparent Player plays the MP4 h.264 directly - you need no other software. The beauty of this player is that it not only streams Flash FLV, it streams MP4 h.264 and .mov file formats. You don't want to convert the MP4 to Flash, that would downgrade it appreciably, just create the MP4 HD h.264 with PTE, put it and the Transparent Player on your website as instructed by the company and your visitors will be able to see streamed MP4 which they click on your link or embedded image, etc.

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks for the explanation on the compression. But I am still confused about whether or not I need an additional piece of software to convert the MP4 h.264 output from PTE to FLV or is there a way to use this transparent player to directly play the MP4 h.264 file. Sorry for being so dense. And thanks in advance!

[mhwarner]

Thanks, Lin.

I experimented a bit and figured out that I just had to substitute my filename "testfile.mp4" for the "player.flv" reference in the sample html file. Now I will experiment with sizing and transitions to see what works best. My sample file that I have tested locally is 1280x720 and about 37 MB. The transitions (which were simple fade transitions in PTE) seem to be kind of jerky. I would probably not put files that large on my site so I guess I need to figure out settings in the PTE Video Builder to determine what will make the smoothest videos.

I appreciate your responses.

[Picsel]

Hi Daniel,

I don't understand - is there a question? PTE, Pinnacle, Vegas, Magix, and other software support AVCHD but these are not and do not contain web "players".

You can't use these above programs to stream video from your website. Transparent Player streams Flash and MP4 h.264 among other formats. Transparent Player doesn't allow you to "create" content. These are different processes.

Lin

Hi Lin

Sorry for that, I really appreciate your search and all information you provided to us to find an efficient way to solve this issue and many thanks for your work and time.

I agree with you, that could be the best solution for professionnal webmaster people. For those people, spending more than 100$ just for a video player is still a bargain. But I just wanted to point out that for a lot of people it is very very expensive by comparison with other software fonctionnalities.

To come back on my previous post, I have made some test on my side. I created a short run with PTEv5.6RC that I converted in mp4 file (hd 1920x1080 medium quality)

and I tried to view it after on my computer. I was very surprised neither WMP, neither VLC_MP read it properly. At the moment I thought my PC was not powerful enough.

I remember there was a notice in PTE which recommended to use Media Player Classic_ Home Cinema. I downloaded and installed MPC_HC and everything was working perfectly well. I can guess that in fact my PC was perhaps not powerful enough but it seems that MPC_HC requires less CPU resources and works better than other players.

If I understood well, this player is an open source software as for VLC . And I can guess that sooner or later, the linux world will release such streaming player for free. As I already mentionned it seems, but I am not expert in video, that streaming possibility already exists with VLC using VideoLan Manager. VLC and VLM are both open source softwares.

Daniel.

[deskjet1uk]

Hi Lin,

I really appreciate your expertise on this matter, thank you for taking the time to do the research and post your findings and opinions.

I think it looks exciting and i am definately considering buying.

Regards

Ralph

[mastermind]

Hi Guys,

I just popped in to check out the discussion... and it looks like there is quite a bit going on so I should probably read over your posts and see if I can offer any answers and insight into my product.

I will try and pop in and offer some answers soon.

My thoughts on the pricing concern is this:

1. Concerns on price are related to a personal budget rather than the features of the product. Value is relative to value derived from actual use of what is received. To get the return of value from the investment you must be prepared to use the item to accomplish specific goals.

One company published one video which was nothing more than someone speaking for 15 seconds on their site. They paid $900 for the actor, the shoot, the editing, and the player which took about 4 hours to put together.

That one video increased their conversion rate by 12%. That 12% represented a $200,000 increase in sales over a year time. Not a bad ROI.

The player is similar... if used and if used properly you can derive significant value from its use. Even a financial ROI if you are using it to present video content that can bring you additional business.

Now here is another perspective:

Comparing my player to products from major software companies is like comparing a hand crafted hardwood desk that sells for $5,000 to an entire group of furniture purchased at Wal-Mart for $500.

The quality of our product speaks for itself but the value is derived from its use :-)

My promise is that if you do not like it we offer a guarantee. You don't get that from large software companies. You also do not get a player of this magnitude from anywhere but individual dedicated crafts people such as our selves.

It actually took me 18 months patient searching and various research and development activities and my partner several years of research and development and then both of us together several months of collaboration, testing, and development to produce it.

You get it for the bargain price of $119 :-)

And because of your support of us we continue to provide updates to the product free of charge and invent other amazing things in the future.

2. Yes there definitely are alternatives.

3. No, there is no other player that does anything close to what our player does with its various features and included dhtml script.

========

Concepts behind the player

========

Now having said that it is important to note that this is not an average video player and I would also like to offer some ideas, concepts, and perspectives you may find helpful.

The transparent player was designed with streaming video optimization and direct response video optimization strategies in mind. Additionally part of the development included breaking new ground with dhtml, javascript, and on site behaviors not previously attempted in any other commercially offered player.

Think of it as a creative work... but also one that is continuing to be created. We have imagined several other unique effects that we will add to the project and provide as free updates to the users.

While I am not well acquainted with either your community or much of what you do I did preview some beautiful slide show demos and the idea of seeing that quality of images played in h.264 video is quite intriguing.

Since you know your niche better than I do I would need to look to you to see examples of how you might use my player.

However, my own personal strategies in publishing lead us to create the player so that you can control many aspects of how it can be displayed and played ranging from a floating layer that auto plays to an embedded player with the option to use the first frame of your video as a start image or even an external image as the start frame.

In my mind the most important of our long list of features is how the player buffers and how it loads. Also how it behaves after stop is pressed.

These various aspects are ultimately important so that the publisher can choose to target bit rates appropriate for the speed of the internet connection that their average visitor has in order to make their videos load and play seemingly instantly and without the stuttering and buffering problems that even the most professional video production companies struggle with because they do not understand the simple concepts of direct response video publishing.

Regarding the h.264 format... official support for playing this format in a flash based video player was not released until the end of 2008 with the official release of flashplayer 9 so support for h.264 playback is fairly new.

We wanted to create a player that supported the highest quality formats that publishers can use for video online such as flv encoded with vp6 and mov and mp4 encoded with h.264.

Some of the most popular encoding solutions such as Flix 8 Standard from On2.com ($39) and Flix 8 pro $250 and Sorenson Squeeze for flash pro $299 from SorensonMedia.com work great or encoding h.264 but also I have found great results encoding HD using the HD vp6 encoding settings in Flix Pro and Sorenson Squeeze.

Also note that Quicktime pro from apple ($29) can encode h.264 video.

I am sure you guys have your own favorites and probably know some encoding solutions commonly used in your industry that I am not as acquainted with.

The key to great looking video will depend on the bit rate you encode at and the codec you use and in part the encoder that you use and the encoding process such as vbr and multi pass will also effect your end results.

The lower the bit rate... the lower the quality of the image...

But you must find balance too when you are delivering video on the web.

You need to always encode your video at a bit rate lower than the connection speed of your target market.

If your target market is US broadband you need to consider that a good percentage of the US market is on slow broadband connections at 256kbps. If they try and view a 500kbps video you will need to set the buffer time to be longer so that it can load enough to stop from stuttering.

While I am not a pro video producer you can see an example of a larger hd video on my site (the one embedded directly in the page). I encoded that HD video at a bit rate lower than 256 and set the buffer time to 1 second. That ensures that my videos play instantly without any buffering after that initial second of load time.

My transparent videos are encoded at bit rates around 150kbps or less to ensure ultra fast loading.

However, in your market people are willing to wait for things to load to see the beauty of the production you create so you can get away with setting the buffer time a little longer... but I recommend not longer than 10 seconds generally which still means you need to optimize your bit rates.

If people are really interested in your content they will be willing to wait longer and you can experiment with offering high bit rate and lower bit rate options so that the impatient can see a fast preview and the patient can wait for the HQ HD version to load at a higher bit rate to deliver higher image quality.

===================================================

Concepts regarding on page publishing and optimization strategies

====================================================

Another thing to consider about your market... you all are suggesting displaying videos at high resolutions. Big wide large videos.

These are best not embedded directly in a web page...

My player includes dhtml layer scripting that allows your visitors to trigger video to play in a floating layer that can be positioned anywhere in the page including absolute center.

These videos can be triggered by links or thumbnails or start images etc.

This allows you to create nicely organized sites with professional looking preview lists and when a video is done playing the layer can auto close or if they press stop the layer vanishes or if they click another link or thumbnail the layer vanishes.

With the transparent player you are really only limited by your own creativity...

It was designed to be minimal so as to keep emphasis on your content and it was designed to be optimized so as to deliver your content fast and efficiently.

Also note that most players do not have "loading" controls that go as far as our player does. If you were to say embed 5 youtube videos in one page you risk a problem I call "video tasting."

Video tasting is where a visitor clicks and plays the first few seconds of each video embedded in the page to see which one they want to watch. They stop or pause each after a couple seconds of preview and move to the next.

The problem is that all those players they clicked may not be playing but they are still downloading the files in the background.

The transparent player eliminates this problem. When stop is pressed the video stops loading. When play is pressed it resumes loading. They can taste as many videos as they want on your page without the loading problem

Traditionally what would happen is once so many files started loading as soon as the kbps of the visitors internet connection was maxed from those loading files their browser would slow or even freeze.

Many times the only solution was to close the browser or refresh... then the problem starts all over again.

I am sure you have experienced this before.

This is do to poor on page file optimization and video players are the wost culprit.

But that is not the case with Transparent Player. Visitors can preview your works with ease and the load is limited to only one video file at a time which can be optimized to target the speed of your target market.

Last of all there is the bandwidth issue. Some players upon revisit or replay reload the video file needlessly downloading the file again from your server over and over each time a person visits a page and sometimes for some players each time they replay the video.

Transparent player plays the video from the cache every time. Once a file is cashed it will play from the cache on subsequent plays and even subsequent visits to the page. Only if the visitor has cleared their cache would the video be reloaded.

This and your own file compression optimization strategies can save you a ton in bandwidth.

Most people will never have enough traffic for this to be much of a concern and there are some really great economy hosting solutions out there such as www.aplus.net , which I have tested with hundreds of thousands of video views, which offer huge amounts of bandwidth for under $10 a month.

But other companies using services such as Amazon S3's unlimited pay as you go plans who see significant volumes of views reaching into the hundreds of thousands and even millions of views can get shockers when it comes to time to pay the bill.

If you optimize your video via encoding compression strategies and if you use a player such as transparent player that plays from the cache you can significantly reduce your bandwidth consumption.

Last of all and probably most important of all... when you are able to stream h.264 in a flash video player you have far greater market reach than quicktime player and windows media player. Flashplayer is a smaller download for those that do not have it instealled but it is estimated that more than 98% of computers in the world have Flashplayer installed and 97%+ have Flashplayer 9 installed which supports h.264 playback. For those that do not have it installed it is only a 2mb download and an instant installation.

If you are publishing any video content online you should never publish it with anything except for a flash based player to ensure your market reach and ease of consumption.

That's all the insights I have to share for now... I look forward to seeing the creative uses you all come up with for the transparent player. It is always my users that come up with the most powerful strategies for publishing with my tools.

My goal is always just to provide a highly versatile and leading edge solution that frees the publisher up to accomplish their goals.

If you are a user of Transparent Player do not forget that our support desk is the place to go for any tech support issues.

Regards,

Josh Anderson

http://transparentplayer.com

[Lin Evans]

Hi Josh,

Thanks much for the great information about Transparent Player! I'm looking forward to trying it as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Lin

[Picsel]

Hello Josh

Thanks for all your information.

Is your Transparentplayer based on Akamaï Open Video Player Initiative or not?

Daniel.

[mastermind]

Hello Josh

Thanks for all your information.

Is your Transparentplayer based on Akamaï Open Video Player Initiative or not?

Daniel.

We developed my player and the dhtml/javascript library from scratch.

So no. Not sure why you would ask that?

Its our own invention and it was developed specifically to provide functions and features that other players on the market lack.

My philosophy is this:

1. If it is the best recommend it

2. If it is free and the best recommend it

3. If its not the best develop it

So in this case there was no other player that did what I wanted to accomplish so we created our own project with no other outside contributions and from our own code which is not "open."

Its a private development project and more of a "specialized" player given its unique features and functions for which it was designed. We own all the code and copyrights to the scripts and source code.

[maderemark]

Josh,

I'm using an old, not well-known program to maintain my website called Adobe PageMill 3.0. I don't know, nor want to know how to write html. Can I use your player with a WYSIWYG web site program like this without having to mess with html code?

Thanks,

Mark Madere

P.S. For what your program does - I think it's a very reasonable price. But FREE is always better!

[mastermind]

Josh,

I'm using an old, not well-known program to maintain my website called Adobe PageMill 3.0. I don't know, nor want to know how to write html. Can I use your player with a WYSIWYG web site program like this without having to mess with html code?

Thanks,

Mark Madere

P.S. For what your program does - I think it's a very reasonable price. But FREE is always better!

Hi Mark,

At the minimum you must be able to copy and paste html code into your page's html code where you want the player to appear.

In addition to that there are variables that cotrol functions of our player. For example the documentation will tell you to make it autoplay you need to change false to true in the html code.

or to use a dhtml layer and make it appear above a page in the position you want you will need to change the setting to a number from 1 to 9 representing various positions wich each value we explain in the documentation.

So I would say for a user like you who does not have or want to obtain basic html understanding my player is not the right fit.

But I also recommend that everyone learn at least to be able to copy and paste html so that they can make minor changes to their wysiwyg designs and paste in script includes etc into their html pages.

[Almark]

Very interesting, I will be watching this thread! Thanks Lin

[Guest Techman1]

Josh,

What is required on the viewers browser to see the slideshows/videos using your player? Does javascript need to be invoked on the client's browser? Do they need a certain level of flash player installed on their browser?

Thanks in advance for the information.

Fred

[mastermind]

Our player is flash based so flashplayer must be installed on the users computer.

Depending on any type of media content you put media on a website some player must be installed... ie Windows Media Player, Quicktime player, flashplayer

The great thing about flashplayer is that it is the most prolific software on the planet installed on more computers than any other media player reaching over 98% of the world market. Additionally it is the smallest and fastest download and if a user does not have it installed (which is almost never) they will be prompted to download it from Adobe.

To play h.264 encoded videos regardless of the flash based video player you use a visitor must have flashplayer 9 or higher installed. Flashplayer 9 has more than 97% world market penetration.

Our player does use javascript for the include. It also uses javascript and dhtml if you use the advanced dhtml popup features. You could not do that without scripting.

Josh,

What is required on the viewers browser to see the slideshows/videos using your player? Does javascript need to be invoked on the client's browser? Do they need a certain level of flash player installed on their browser?

Thanks in advance for the information.

Fred

[Guest Techman1]

Thanks Josh!

I figured that was the answer, but wanted to make sure. Also, it's important for everyone on here to know what is required on the end users PC's to view their slideshows if they elect to purchase your software. It seems that is the standard these days for flash players (Flash 9 and up).

Thanks again and good luck with your software. It is an exceptional product especially if you have a lot of sales and you are marketing to online customers. I like the way it is designed and the popup features are an added bonus. Again all the best to you & your company!

-Fred