[TBA]: Streaming h264 mp4s

[Greg Marra]

Hi all,

The Blue Alliance is thinking about streaming higher quality videos instead of the Flash Video format videos we stream now. These would be h264 encoded mp4s, which are what many of our downloadable videos are right now.

There are a few advantages to moving towards this format. One is that we'd be able to use the HTML5 <video> tag in some browsers, particularly enabling playback on iPhone and Android OS mobile devices. This also will save us some disk space, and give you a better viewing experience in your browser.

The only potential downside is that it will take longer to buffer a 20-30mb video than a 7mb video, but based on our Google Analytics data it appears that this will not be an issue for nearly all of our users. We're going to do some experiments before we fully switch over to this.

Here's the catch: I can't get the Flash Video Player we use (JW FLV Player: http://www.longtailvideo.com/) to play h264 videos. It's supposed to according to its documentation, but I gave it an afternoon and couldn't get it to work. If someone can get a working sample together, I'll be able to roll it out on TBA.

Can anyone lend us some technical assistance?

Thanks!
-Greg

[synth3tk]

I'll play around with my VPS tonight and see what I can do.

For consistency, can I have one of the TBA videos to test on?

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by synth3tk

For consistency, can I have one of the TBA videos to test on?

Here is an example mp4: http://thebluealliance.net/tbatv/vids/10ma/ma_qm73.mp4

Thanks!

[synth3tk]

Thanks!

Are you using that latest version of JW Player (5.1)?

[synth3tk]

http://team964.com/tba-mp4test/

I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for. I'm about to go check out a page on TBA using Firebug just to see what you have so far.

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by synth3tk

http://team964.com/tba-mp4test/

I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for. I'm about to go check out a page on TBA using Firebug just to see what you have so far.

Yea this is pretty much exactly what I wanted. I wasn't using JW 5.1, but I was under the impression the version I had worked well enough. I'll try copying your player code over to the development version of TBA and see if we can't get h264 videos going

Thanks!

[synth3tk]

No problem! Reading the changelogs, they did add h264 support since the version that you're using.

If you need any more help, let me know.

On a side note, I may look into making a skin for you guys to use. The default JW Player skin is overused.

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by synth3tk

On a side note, I may look into making a skin for you guys to use. The default JW Player skin is overused.

We'd love it!