I'm hoping some of you here have some experience creating websites similar in functionality to YouTube. I'm looking for a good solution to share in-house videos on a website. It’s expected to have several hundred to a few thousand videos eventually. Therefore it needs to be highly scalable and have a professional corporate/enterprise look and feel.

I'm not looking for someone to create it, but rather recommendations for software or scripts that you’ve used and had good experiences with.

What we've looked at so far:
http://www.vbrick.com
http://www.kontiki.com
http://www.kaltura.com
http://www.twistage.com
http://www.ooyala.com
All of them look nice, but the pricing is waaaay over budget right now.

Any thoughts or insight on using PHPmotion? Mainly the ease of use, customization, and supportability.

11/4/2010 4:00:57 PM

What are your requirements in terms of cross-browser and cross-platform compatibilities? Is Silverlight good or bad? What about Flash? Does it need to work in IE6? etc...

11/4/2010 4:23:16 PM

The more compatible across platforms, the better. Don't particularly care about older browsers, but it would be great if a mobile site could be implemented eventually.

I think at this point Flash-based videos are preferred, but I'm not opposed to Silverlight yet.

11/4/2010 4:28:14 PM

Quote :

"mobile site could be implemented eventually"

holy can of worms batman


Everyone that has a working system takes whatever they have and transcodes - there's not a solid solution I've seen to this problem (that scales worth a flip.)

That said there are many, many solutions to this. http://www.phpmotion.com/ I've ran before, but at the time we didn't have a dedicated server so they whined a lot about our CPU usage on the transcode processes.

11/4/2010 9:30:36 PM

A mobile site isn't required, but would be nice if it could happen. Just trying to get some ideas.

11/5/2010 1:19:58 PM

On this note, does anyone know of a similar solution which allows you to bookmark places in your video, and *link* people to specific segments of your video ...

For instance, a table of contents just above the video (shown directly below), where I can click on a section in the table of contents, and it will play just that section of the video?

Sorry to semi hijack the thread ... just reminded me of something I was looking for last week and could not find anywhere.

11/5/2010 2:01:22 PM

^You can do that with Silverlight video for sure. Youtube supports it, as does Hulu, so its possible in flash as well, but no idea if any commercially available software does.

11/5/2010 7:47:44 PM

I for one wish Silverlight became as cross-platform as Flash; so what if it's a Microsoft product, the formats used to build Silverlight applications are all open, which is more than can be said for Flash...

11/5/2010 8:35:48 PM

^It is more cross platform than flash. Silverlight is an open technology. Right now the moonlight client lags behind the windows client, but that's because of a lack of dev community for it, not an inability to work on any platform.

11/5/2010 10:39:00 PM

Does Silverlight exist in some form for Solaris or smartphone platforms other than Symbian or Windows Phone 7?
AFAIK it's only for OS X Intel (PPC was dropped after Silverlight 1), Linux (up to Moonlight 3 Preview, with ports of Moonlight 1 and 2 to FreeBSD), Windows 2000 or later, Windows Phone 7, and Symbian...

...while Flash supports OS X Intel and PPC (and older versions supported classic MacOS), Linux (with a special wrapper available to run on FreeBSD), Solaris, Windows 2000 or later (95 and NT4 were dropped after Flash 9, although KernelEx allows Flash 10.1 to run), and Android (possibly other smartphone platforms), with legacy versions available for HP-UX, IRIX, Symbian, BeOS, OS/2, Palm OS, PocketPC, Maemo, PSP, PS3, Wii, and a shit-ton of other platforms.

11/6/2010 1:00:56 AM