How can I best stream my videos

Question

I created a web site called ustube.me which shows a lot of the personal videos I have filmed over the years. However, since they are rather large files, they take a long time for the viewer to fully load them. How would I become a site such as You tube, where the videos load almost instantly? Is that software based, hardware based?
Thanks

Answer 1

What youtube does is, it starts out by displaying a keyframe of the video as a graphic, with a play button imposed over it. I don't know, but they may or may not be using that time to begin background downloading of the video. When the keyframe is clicked on, they start displaying the video with the video interface. That's my unprofessional take on youtube. I don't know enough about iWeb to know if you could have a setup similar to youtube on your pages.
Additionally, I just think you could have some tighter controls on putting together your web pages. Many of the videos that I clicked on did not autoplay. But, when I clicked on Jacob_catch, it did autoplay. Take a look at your process on Jacob_catch and see how it differs from some of the other pages that you have put together.
One final thing you can do is explore bringing down the size of your videos. The more data that needs to be pushed the longer it will take for a movie to be loaded.
Explore is your encoding process. I looked at a couple of your movies and they were .m4v's. That is a good thing. I don't thing you could do much more there.
Also consider is the dimensions of your videos. Some of them are huge. Your first video is about 936x526. Youtube videos are about 640x386.
Say a video is twice as wide and twice as high as another nearly identical video. It will take about 4 times as long to load. It is a multiplicative thing. A video 1-1/2 time larger in both directions will still take over twice as long to load. Compression plays a factor here. Still more pixels means more data means longer download times.
On server software, I don't thing that will buy you much. I imagine you are serving the web site with a Mac OS X box using Mac OS X client software. Server software will not make a huge difference on spitting out the data quicker.
Hope this helps,
Stephen