HI Douglass

Funnily enough I have spent the last 3 days evaluating Biz Modules UVG, Cross Video Gallery and Coding Staff Ultimate Video Gallery for two projects.

1> A site that will have at most 20 -30 videos.
2> A site that will sell Natural History clips to broadcasters.

For the first site I used Ultimate Video Gallery.
It allows 3 different files types which fall back according to browser and is nice and simple.
http://www.royal-southern.co.uk/Media...  (Coding Staff Ultimate Video Gallery)

Both UVG and CVG are complex modules and to a certain extent push you to work with them in a certain way or structure. They both seem to do what they say they will.

UVG seems to be easier to style with better css but I could not find a way to load a file already on the server without going though its "wizard upload". It has a nice media centre module that will suit many.
CVG offers most of the same features and i found it well abstracted and logical. cannot remember if UVG allow files from the cloud but CVG does and allow lets me link to files to local server files.

Both of these systems will drive you mad at some point.

In reality you are probably going to have to test yourself but if your needs are basic video clips organised into categories which admins can probably work with then look at the coding staff module.

All 3 play baseline H264 (.mp4) and work on iThings via the HTML5 tag.
They all have sensible trial versions.

Re Formats
Make baseline H264.
A typical wide screen frame size is 600px x 388 with a bit rate of around 2000 kp/s
( as in my example)
We have not bothered to make FLV versions for those old browsers that cannot play MP4 as IMO these people need later browsers for their own good anyway.

Re Playback speed.
The length of the file is not relevant except to bandwidth costs as the file will be "Progressively downloaded" over HTTP anyway. Steaming uses a different protocol and windows media server.  The issue (if there is one) is simply buffering.

1G seems very long for an mp4 - at the size / rate of the clips on my site the file size is around 10MB per minute.

Note that some mp4 encodes from older editions of Adobe Premier put an important bit of hex called the MovAtom at the end of the file causing it to fully download before playing. If you have clips like this I have a tool to fix.

Note sure of your video source format but I would suggest that that you encode all clips using the same encoder and setting and that you make test first.
I still do a bit of editing so have Adobe export encoder but I also use the very capable Xillsoft 6 Ultimate Video converter. Not expensive and can handle any format.

Both UVG and CVG offer on server conversion to MP4.
IMO: Do your conversion offline - the online methods are simply not as good - probably as they do not really let you fine tune. they also need full trust in the server.

Hope this helps

Ian




 

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Mutate and Survive

Hiya

Many things affect choice but having checked these all out mine would be CrossVideo mainly for the capability but also for the support speed and quality.
 
Good luck with your project
 
 Ian

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Mutate and Survive