ACE content on my.strathspey can embed YouTube videos, but if you’d rather not post your videos to YouTube, you can host them on the my.strathspey system directly. Please do not upload them to your page, because this means downloads would need to go through the content management system – which would work, but would tie up system resources and make the system slower for other users. Instead, upload them to the “media server”, where they will be made available for straight HTTP without the content management system’s overhead.
For the time being, the only way of accessing the media server is via
specially-arranged FTP. If you want to upload videos, Anselm will be
more than pleased to add a _media directory to your FTP area that
will point to the media server, such that stuff you put into that
directory will not be available through the content management system
but from the media server instead. Generally, if your sub-site on
my.strathspey is called foobar then a file called XYZ.mp4 you put
into your _media directory will be available from
http://media.strathspey.org/media/foobar/XYZ.mp4. If your user name
is johndoe then the media URL for the same file under the auspices
of your personal site will be
http://media.strathspey.org/media/u/johndoe/XYZ.mp4 This works not
just for video but also for other large data files such as MP3
tracks. – We don’t expect everyone to do this, which is why at the
moment we don’t create this link from the CMS to the media server for
everybody. This policy might change in the future.
For best results with the widest selection of browsers, videos hosted on my.strathspey should be available in two formats, WEBM (VP8 video with Ogg Vorbis audio) and MP4 (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video with AAC audio). You may get away with offering just one of these, but if you do, it should probably be MP4.
The general idea is the following:
Small is generally better, both from a width/height POV but also from a file size POV. People on wireless or mobile connections will thank you for it. For 16:9 video, 640×360 is a good size and often looks reasonable when viewed at full screen size, too (it is similar to SD television).
Use a constant frame rate and de-interlace your video. Good bit rates are 400 to 1000 kbits/s for video and 40 to 80 kbits/s for audio.
Make sure your video uses square pixels. If you’re using a DV (tape) video camera to take 16:9 video, the actual pictures will still be 720×576 pixels on the tape/in the video file, i.e., squashed up so everyone will look very tall and skinny. These videos get unsquashed when they’re being watched but not on my.strathspey.
You can use ffmpeg to create these formats from approximately
whatever you have on hand. We use Flowplayer to display these videos
and there is further
information on the Flowplayer web site.
Once you have uploaded a video (e.g., XYZ.mp4 and/or XYZ.webm) to
your media directory, you can embed it in an ACE document using a tag
like
<<video:media/foobar/XYZ>>
This will display the video inside FlowPlayer, scaled to 640×360 pixels. If you would prefer your video to appear at a different size, append this to the magic link:
<<video:media/foobar/XYZ|1280,720>>
(FlowPlayer will scale your video as required.)
If you want your video to appear floating to the left or right of a paragraph with text flowing around it, use
<<video:media/foobar/XYZ||left>>
(or right). You can of course also specify the size as above.
Feel free to embed multiple videos in the same page.
When the page embedding the video is loaded, the FlowPlayer instance
will by default show a blank screen. If that bothers you (it would
probably bother me), you can get it to display a preview picture from
the video instead. You can produce one very easily using ffmpeg with
a command like
ffmpeg -i XYZ.mp4 -f image2 -ss 0 -vframes 1 XYZ.jpg
Upload the XYZ.jpg file to where you uploaded the XYZ.mp4 file and
the video player should pick this up.
Hope this helps! Contact Anselm if you have further questions.
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