|
|
| Creating & adding videos to your website |
Do you want to publish your videos on your website? Its a simple 3 step process
Depending on your needs, you may or may not require all the 3 steps. There are a lot of tools out there which can perform all the these 3 steps, but we will take a look at some tools which are free and gives acceptable quality. Lets discuss about each of these steps in detail now.
| Step 1: Record your video | |
Are you looking to add an existing video to your website or do you want to create a new video and upload? If you already have a video which you want to upload, you can ignore this step. But if you want to create a new video (e.g. recording a presentation), you need to have some means to capture your screen and voice.
CamStudio is a free screen recording software which produces good acceptable quality videos. Considering that this is a free tool, it does a wonderful job - you get what you want. However, your output file produced may be huge in size; but with proper setting/codecs and compressions you can retain(or with little loss of quality) the quality and produce videos with smaller relatively smaller size. Using CamStudio you can record the screen and audio at the same time, then save the recorded video as a .avi or convert it to .swf. So lets get into the nitty-gritty details of recording with CamStudio
Step 1.a: Download CamStudio. You can check the website for the latest versions. After installation, you will find the following installed
CamStudio - to record videos
MoviePlayer - to playback recorded videos
SWF Producer - to convert to .swf
Step 1.b: Download DivXCodec. Codecs are used to compress and decompress the videos. Your video quality and size will vary depending on the type of codec you are using. DivX provides good compression, but if you have/find any other codec thats works better you can go with your codec.
Step 1.c: SetUp your CamStudio.
Before you start recording, get your CamStudio ready.
Select Video Options from 'Options' menu
Select 'DivX Codcec' as the compressor. After you install the DivX codec it should appear in the list automatically.
Depending on from where your audio input is coming, select the appropriate audio option from 'Options->Audio Options' menu.
Set the decoding format. 22.05kHz was pretty good for me.
Select Keyboard Shortcuts from 'Options' menu.Here you can set the different keyboard shortcuts keys for different actions. For example, you can set F8 for 'Record', F9 for Stop etc.
Bring up your application and hit the shortcut key to record or click the record button highlighted in red in the CamStudio window. Once your recording is over, hit the shortcut key for stop or click on the stop button. Based on your settings, it might ask you to save the recorded video as a .avi file on your computer. Sucessfully completed step 1, you are ready with your video..only thing now is putting up your video on your website.
Tip: Before you record your video, its better to do a test record for about 1 minute so that you wont waste a lot of time if something was messed up and the recording dint go well.
| Step 2: Convert/Compress your video to required format | |
OK, you have completed a big part of recording your video...but getting your content on your website is more important part because unless you put your video up on your website and give your users easy/fast way to access your videos all your hard work is a big waste of time.
There are a lot of ways/tools by which you can upload your video on your webiste and quite a few formats in which you want to upload your video. You can upload the .avi dierectly, but issue you are going to observe is - more time to load the video and issues your website viewers might face is the video doesn't play at all because their computer cannot play .avi files or there are some codec issues. So, the best bet is to convert your .avi files to .flv. Flash is by default/can easily be installed on any computer and hence your videos will be universally compatible. You will quickly do that if I say that Youtube and Google videos (and many others) use .flv format to play videos on their website. CamStudio does provide an avi to swf converter, but it takes a lot time for the conversion and you will run into issues trying to convert big files; also the html file it creates for you with the video doesn't have a lot of player options.
I found a very good free avi to flv converter - Bit Comet FLV Converter. The quality of the output/size/speed I got from this tool is a lot better than some of the paid tools I tried. Download Bit Comet and install. Launch the BitComet FLV Converter.
Give your avi file as source, it is going to create the flv file with the same filename as your avi and in the same directory by default. You can change the default setting to save it to some other folder with some other name. The settings given above works good for me. This tool has two language options - English and Chinese.
Give your source file, set the video/audio options and click on the 'Convert' button. This is going to take a couple of minutes (more or less depending on your file size). Just wait for the magic, and there you have your .flv video ready to be shared with the whole world. Even though you select English as a language it gives a message in Chinese at the end, simple say ok. If you want to view your flv on your computer, you need a flv player. You can download one of the free flv players for your desktop and see if everything has gone good as expected.
Before we can move to Step 3, we need to do one more thing in this step. flv players (the one I will be using) expects some meta-data tags so that we take full advantages of the features it provides. So, we need a tool that can fix our flv file. Use FLVMDI Metadata Injector (also called FLVMDI), which is a free software that fixes your flv files.
Simply launch the app and provide the source and destination file names. Fixes your flv file and gives a success/failure message.
Phew! gets us to the end to step 2, and only one step away from your first video.
| Step 3: Add your video to your website | |
Download JW FLV Media Player. This software is free for noncommercial use and you have to agree to the noncommercial license before you downlaod the software. I think you can need to buy the commercial license for about 20 euros (check the website for the correct details on this). This software is going to play your flv vidoes in the web browser. This is cool software and does a lot for little/zero money from you.
a) Download the player and save the .js and .swf files at some location on your server from where you will access it
b) Copy your .flv file to the server
c) Create a html and insert this code in your html file to embed the video in your html.
<embed src="http://www.jeroenwijering.com/embed/player.swf" width="620" height="410"
allowfullscreen="true" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
flashvars="file=http://www.sharmanj.com/test_flv.flv&fullscreen=true" /> |
you need to replace the text highlighted in red with your files/values. However, you can also use the player.swf from jeroenwijering website itself. The code I put in adds the flv file to the player and allows fullscreen mode. You can check the various options you have available on the website, you can the player from javascript as well.
It is recommended that you use the Setup wizard to check different types of options you can choose from and the code you need to put effectively.
If you need to change the look, you have a variety of skins which you can choose from. Test the skins on the SetUp wizard and see what code changes you need to make.
Congrats!!!! There you have your first video on the web.
|
|
|
| |
| Comments |
|
|
|