Web streaming video & audio and Webcasting

[The Beltster]

I need info about webcasting and streaming video such as:

 

Do I need capability in-house or do I serve myself better outsourcing it and if so what is the cost to do it, how does it work, is it per/visitor? by the file size? do I pay extra for storage of files, do I pay more each time a video file or audio file is accessed?

 

If anybody knows anything about this and can help, please shoot me over a PM.

 

Thanks alot.

[Slim Jim]

I'm guessing you just want to stream it from a website.

 

There are a number of services you can pay for, but it can be done for free. You could get a flash player that streams movies and music from your server (there are free ones you can look for). The other option is using Windows Media. You'll need to encode any movie files into wmv. This code worked for me:

 

First create an .asx file in notepad and bung it on your web server

 

<asx version="3.0">

<entry>

<ref href="MOVIE FILE" />

<starttime value="00:00:00" />

<abstract>DESCRIPTION</abstract>

<title>MOVIE TITLE</title>

<author>MOVIE AUTHOR</author>

<copyright>COPYRITGHT INFO</copyright>

</entry>

</asx>

 

Replace the words in caps with info about the movie (ref href is the most important as its the url of the movie).

 

Then bung this code in your webpage

 

<object classid="clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11D3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"

id="WindowsMediaPlayer1" width="550" height="400" border="0">

<param name="URL" value="FILE">

<param name="rate" value="1">

<param name="balance" value="0">

<param name="currentPosition" value="0">

<param name="defaultFrame" value>

<param name="playCount" value="1">

<param name="autoStart" value="-1">

<param name="currentMarker" value="0">

<param name="invokeURLs" value="-1">

<param name="baseURL" value>

<param name="volume" value="50">

<param name="mute" value="0">

<param name="uiMode" value="full">

<param name="stretchToFit" value="0">

<param name="windowlessVideo" value="0">

<param name="enabled" value="-1">

<param name="enableContextMenu" value="-1">

<param name="fullScreen" value="0">

<param name="SAMIStyle" value>

<param name="SAMILang" value>

<param name="SAMIFilename" value>

<param name="captioningID" value>

<param name="enableErrorDialogs" value="0">

<param name="_cx" value="8996">

<param name="_cy" value="8467">

 

<embed type="application/x-mplayer2"

name="MediaPlayer1"

pluginspage = "http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/"

width="325"

height="310"

src="FILE">

</embed>

 

</object>

 

You can replace FILE with the asx file and adjust the size parameters to suit your file.

 

Try this out, play around with it, etc.