Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product pages?

[simpleelegance]

Good morning!

My top supplier has added INCREDIBLE videos of their gowns on the runway -

this would be a HUGE selling tool for us.

CAN NOT figure out how to get the videos to play on our site?

Hot linking is a "no no" - have a couple samples loaded to our own site -
but can't get them to work.

SOMEBODY HELP ME!!! :-)

~Michelle

[entrepre7]

Re: Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product page

What about creating a youtube page for your business. Putting them in there and then you can display them on your site. Youtube gives you the code to embed it onto your site.

[simpleelegance]

Re: Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product page

What about creating a youtube page for your business. Putting them in there and then you can display them on your site. Youtube gives you the code to embed it onto your site.

That IS a good idea - but I don't think my supplier would approve of hosting these somewhere other than our website
(very strict requirements about retail accounts & their digital media)

Any clue how I can host and serve these locally?

~Michelle

[Brandon MUS]

Re: Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product page

It's very easy to do, but you want to talk to your host. I use this: http://videojs.com/ another option is: http://www.longtailvideo.com/jw-player/

[simpleelegance]

Re: Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product page

It's very easy to do, but you want to talk to your host. I use this: http://videojs.com/ another option is: http://www.longtailvideo.com/jw-player/

I did look at the options you posted, Brandon - but unfortunately neither of these solutions work with the SWF video files we use...

I DID finally get a video playing on one of our test pages:

http://www.gownsbysimpleelegance.com/PROD/Alyce6630.html

Would you mind making sure you can view it without issues?

~Michelle

[Brandon MUS]

Re: Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product page

If you have SWF videos, I don't believe you need anything else to play the video (just embed and go). While SWF isn't the ideal video choice in my opinion, yes, I can view the video without any problems.

[kayakbabe]

Re: Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product page

Just a heads up.

If your products are popular or at least if your videos are...
You may run into an issue where people complain about the video not being available or that they are really really slow to load.
And if poeple are watching your videos, it can slow down your site. AND, your bandwidth costs are going to go up if people are watching them.

Unless you have specially designed video hosting... then your server may queu up requests for that file... for little files like an image or a html or txt file its not a big deal. Web server operating systems are designed to deliver those quick. But once you get into the video world... things change. videos are very big files normally... and that can really put a bummer on a server designed to spit out little chunks of data and small files like a normal web sites.. it takes some special tweaking to host videos well. That is why a lot of the bigger sites either have a separate server just for their videos... or they contract with a specialized video host to hold their files. It's the whole reason the technology that made youtube came about in the first place was developed.

Besides youtube there are other video hosting solutions like Vimeo and some are very inexpensive. Some offer paid accounts where the video will only allow referrals that come from code or a link on your site to play the video... so people can't link to it from other websites.

We use both Youtube and Vimeo.

[InvincibleRecordings]

Re: Calling out to my guru's yet again :-) Need help adding videos to my product page

The program we are currently using to play our audio files and is capable of playing video is called "Pickle" http://www.pickleplayer.com/ It is HTML 5 compliant but also supports non-conplient browsers. Unfortunately you have to use SWF files which are not HTML compliant. But the same company also has a program called "Wimpy Player" which supports flash. In the past we used Wimpy Player and it works great. Both version are skin-able with a collection they supply or you can create your own.

I guess you know that your flash files will not play on apple phones. I am not sure about the ipad. Regarding the comments about using up bandwidth and hard drive space. Unless you have many hours of video, that should not be an issue with most hosting companies as video SWF and H.264 are very efficient formats. Its good to check though and make sure your not getting charged MIVA hosting for lots of media file space which costs more than a generic server.

We sell thousands of download so we need over 200 GB of hard drive space just for audio. So we rent our own 250 GB dedicated server with 1&1 hosting for about $49.00 a month which is only used for media. Then we also have a company that hosts MIVA on a shared server. Between the 2 we have all our server needs satisfied.