I am asking this question on SO because a similar question was asked here and migrated to SuperUser, but the answers it got there were more about screen sharing than hosting screencasts. I'm hoping that some of you have faced (and solved) this issue before...
My team is putting together a bunch of technical screencasts, and we are currently hosting them ourselves. We would much prefer to host them externally, to take advantage of a bigger pipe, geographically distributed data centers, and better uptime.
The screencasts are typically less than 10 minutes.
Is there a programmer-centric screencast hosting solution? Would you recommend YouTube? Vimeo? Something else?
Since Jon's answer two years ago, there have been a few additions to the screencast market:
Screencast.com, by TechSmith. The makers of Snagit, Camtasia, and Jing have a place where you can host your Screencasts at any resolution. It's not as straightforward as Screenr, but it provides you many options to upload your videos. You can upload by file or directly from Snagit 11, Jing (Free), or Camtasia.
YouTube and Vimeo (Pro) continue to be good options if you're looking for a hosting platform and they now both support a large range of HD formats as well as supporting HTML5. The drawback (or benefit?) is that your video is going to be converted to their playback resolution(s) rather than your source resolution. Snagit 11 will even upload directly to YouTube now.
Screencast.com seems like a good option if your main concern is recording screencasts on the fly and getting them uploaded quickly.
YouTube and Vimeo are probably better choices if you want your videos to be visible to the widest possible audience.
While Vimeo is more of a professional site, YouTube offers HTML5 / H.264 video playback support for all videos, so they'll play on iPhone. Vimeo currently doesn't support that on user videos, and is planning on adding it as a pro feature in the future.
If you are really concerned about 1-to-1 pixel resolution in your screencast, Vimeo Pro is not the best choice. My files had an exact 1920 to 1080 resolution and I exported them from Screenflow in "lossless". It appeared very crisp on the Mac in Quicktime Player, but after uploading to Vimeo Pro, turning HD "on", I could not read the details.
Vimeo is quick, but they have a compression good for movie scenes, but bad for small computer screen fonts. I am trying screencast.com since they leave the file "as is".
Personally, I prefer to see videos on something like Vimeo rather than YouTube or a similar site. Vimeo has a certain air of professionalism about it while still be convenient and user-friendly. Also, you can put embedded videos on your support pages if you wish or simply link to the videos in FAQs or forums. It makes it very convenient. Again though, this is just MHO.
A popular modern option is Wistia. They are more expensive than say Vimeo, but they have excellent tools for collecting emails and for analyzing how well your videos are doing. Basically they are hosting combined with video marketing.
I decided to go with them for my indie-hacker screencasts site.
Related
My website pictures loading are slow in the server and failing google mobile testing- In google mobile testing pass my website but some of the (18 pictures) are loading slowly. This is basic hosting I am running my website. Can anyone helps on this(suggestion and recommendation). Thanks.
Generally you can use Photoshop or an online service to optimize your pictures, there are also free optimization services up to certain limits.
This question is a little bit old, but can quide you in the right direction. You can also have look here.
Personally I do not have Photoshop and I use Kraken free service.
The optimization can be lossy or lossless, I prefer lossless (without a visual decrease in quality).
I've built a webapp to host low-res proxies of our teams video files. The webapp is primarily for tagging and searching video. Additionally, I'd like to be able to play a random playlist of clips on TVs around the office. I've implemented this by "Casting Tab" to a Chromecast, and it works fine.
However, now I'm running up against the bandwidth limitations of my host. Latency and everything is fine, but to run a single TV's 2.5Mbps stream 8hrs a day for 23 days a month comes to about 207 GB/month, 20% of my alotted 1TB monthly transfer.
How can i build something that will "cache" these clips client-side, so that it doesnt re-download them unnecessarily? There are about 1000 clips. I'd prefer to keep it connected to my webapp via browser or some API endpoint so the RAND() stream of clips is constantly updated as people add to it.
Note: I asked a related question yesterday, and it seemed to fix my specific issue, but it doesn't seem to have worked at scale, so I'm broadening the approach a bit. Browser Caching of images and videos served via php query strings
Shaka Player has built-in support for offline playback, along with a pretty good API for listing offline assets, and removing them again.
This would require that you have your videos in MPEG-DASH format. Luckily Google also has a tool available for that. Shaka Packager can take your mp4's and package them for MPEG-DASH, provided the MP4's follow some simple requirements.
You could probably build something yourself using similar mechanisms to the Shaka Player, but it seems much easier to use Shaka for doing it.
I see a lot of applications in the Mac App store, such as MiniTube and CloudPlay, which appear to stream high quality video directly from YouTube, without using any sort of embedded player.
However, I don't see any means of doing this through the documented API. Is their scraping (e.g. http://gitorious.org/minitube/minitube/blobs/master/src/video.cpp) illegal/against the TOS, or merely undocumented and unsupported? Is there a better way of doing it?
(In particular, the so-called "chromeless" iframe player actually has a significant amount of chrome/user interaction, which is more suitable for a website than for a native application.)
EDIT: I suppose my question is primarily for the official YouTube developer support: is scraping the page for the stream against the TOS? If it is, why are these apps allowed to remain on the app store, and if it isn't, what is the best way of doing so?
Never tried this, but according to this discussion here it's against the TOS to access the native streams. They also mention that you are free to access the rstp streams made for mobile devices through the api.
So I think scraping the page is the only way to get the higher quality videos without using an embedded player in your application. If you're okay with lower quality then use the rstp way.
Another discussion about the same subject.
Any scraping would violate YouTube's TOS. There are no undocumented APIs available either. For iOS the best provide option is to use the YouTube iframe embed, but that will be within a webview. For Android, YouTube is building a library to do playback without a webview. Here's a video of the announcement http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WFsx-u-q3Y&feature=player_embedded. It's not launched yet, but I know they've been working very hard on it and it should be available soon.
I have several YouTube videos embedded on my website. I'm using the Jquery youtubeplaylist.js to load and play the movies. I recently noticed that the videos on my website stall and stutter occasionally. If I watch the same videos directly through YouTube then the videos load quickly and play smoothly.
Could it be the youtubeplaylist script that is causing the slow down? Or, could it be the fact that I am loading the video in at a custom size?
Also, does YouTube give preference to the videos played directly on their site?
I've seen the same problem, but there are too many variables to know for sure. It's clear that the nocookie player that loads from youtube-nocookie loads much slower than the regular player. Google has likely devoted fewer resources to this version of the player, probably because it garners less revenue to make up for the cost of serving video. Using the regular player, things do appear to be slower at times outside of YouTube, but that could be purely coincidental.
Having shared hosting or not shouldn't matter, since as you note the video stream is directly between Google's servers and the user's browser.
We are developing a social website and looking to implement video/audio chat for users (people a user is friends with). Most of the talk from the tech team was to use flash. But I don't want users to install anything. Can video/audio/conferencing be done purely in AJAX? Either develop it from scratch or use open source frameworks if any?
Flash is already installed on practically ever browser out there -- except iPhones, iPads, etc. which will likely never support Flash.
AJAX and HTML and CSS currently have no access to video and audio input hardware, so that's a non-starter. In the future this may change.
For now Flash is (for better or for worse) the best way to go.
No, unfortunately you can only do this with a plugin (ie Flash).
I don't believe you have access to video or audio input devices from just the browser.
HTML5 will be the answer in the near future (Work in progress): Link1 and Link2
But for now the only option is Flash