www.mydeo.com

What is the best Bit-rate for online video?

The main thing to remember when dealing with online video is that the delivery of the video is hugely dependant on the viewer’s internet connection. The slower their internet connection, the lower the quality your video will have to be for them to receive it without any buffering. A standard 2 Mbps connection at full speed will be able to stream a video clip of up to 2 Mbps, however, it is highly unlikely that the connection is going to be running at full speed. There are many factors that affect the speed of a connection – this is why broadband providers say ‘up to 2 Mbps’. If your intention is to get your video out to as many viewers as possible you need to think about the lowest common denominator. ie. ‘What is the slowest connection speed that I am going to have to stream to?’ You also need to think about the lowest quality of the video that is acceptable to you. With both of these in mind, we would suggest a bit-rate between 500 kbps and 750 kbps. This will give you a quality that is acceptable to most people while still being deliverable on slower internet connections.

What format should I use?

There are many options when it comes to deciding what format to have your videos in. The decision needs to be made by knowing a little bit about your audience. If you intend to stream to mobile phones, for example, you need to pick a format that the media players on the phones can play. For standard website delivery, however, the choice is much easier. There are three main formats which you could choose from (there are many others available but none are considered standard). These are Flash, Windows Media and QuickTime. Each of these three has their own pros and cons but the main one to look at is market penetration. QuickTime is predominantly an Apple Mac format, meaning that some viewers with windows may not be able to watch your video without installing the software – which could put some users off. The same goes for Windows media and Apple users; they will have to install Windows media player for Apple. Flash has the highest market saturation which means that if you are trying to reach an audience who use both PCs and Macs this will be the best way to go.

Should I stream my videos or deliver them over HTTP?

The answer to this question is not as simple as picking one or the other. There is no doubt that streaming a video will save you on bandwidth costs. Having said that, you might have to lower the quality of your video to make sure that it is delivered to all of your viewers properly (especially the ones with slow internet connections). A great article to read which will help you decide is located here http://blog.mydeo.com/2009/01/12/streaming-vs-progressive-download-understanding-the-difference/. A basic rule of thumb is, if you have short video clips HTTP delivery will be fine because even if the whole file is downloaded you bandwidth usage will not be huge. If you have longer clips, streaming may be a better option to save on bandwidth costs.

What player should I use?

If you are using Windows media player or QuickTime the answer to this is obvious – Windows media player or QuickTime player. If you have decided to use flash we would suggest a player called FlowPlayer. It is very simple to set up and is fully customisable, and the best part is that it is free to use the open source license and a commercial license is only $95 (at the time of writing this).  They have great tutorials on their site which makes setting it up a breeze. You can find FlowPlayer at http://flowplayer.org.

Why do I need a CDN (content delivery network)?

Simply put, a CDN will speed up the delivery of your file, be it video, audio or static content. If you were to put your content on your web server with your website you could risk your files not being delivered to everyone who visits your site. A web server has a finite amount of bandwidth and the further your content has to travel the longer it will take. Let’s assume someone in Australia is trying to view your website which is hosted in the USA. That data has to literally travel across the whole world to get to the users browser. While this may be acceptable for something like HTML files which are small, imagine a video file which is much bigger going all that way. A CDN will deliver your file from its closest node thus speeding up the delivery of your file by limiting its journey. Because the bandwidth is limited on your web server, this means that the more people who are viewing your site the more connections that bandwidth has to be shared by. Eventually there will simply not be enough bandwidth to deliver anything properly to anyone. A CDN not only has much more bandwidth available to it at each node but it is also delivering the file from more than one location, depending on where your viewers are. You can literally have millions of viewers all watching the same video at the same time without the delivery being affected by it.

How much bandwidth do I need?

The amount of bandwidth that you will use is determined by three things. The bit-rate (quality) of the file, its length and how many times it is viewed. We have a bandwidth estimator which can help you decide how much you need here https://m3.mydeo.com/Business/plans.aspx . Try not to sign up for an inflexible plan or sign contracts for too long. You might find that your bandwidth requirements change and then you are tied into a contract either paying for more than you need, or over paying because you are using more than your allowance. With an m3 account, you can change plan from month to month meaning that if you expect high traffic for one month only you can commit yourself to a higher bandwidth usage for that month and revert back to a smaller plan from the next month.