Help me find the easiest way to share videos with a small private group of people.

October 12, 2008 1:31 PM

I am making a DVD with 20 bands playing 3 songs each. I want the bands to see their footage before I send the finished product to a duplicator. Should I use a videohosting site or use my own shared hosting account?

I am making a DVD with 20 bands playing 3 songs each. I want the bands to see their footage before I send the finished product to a duplicator.

I can't give them dvds in person because they live all over the place and mailing a dvd isn't quick enough and I don't want dvds floating around of this stuff especially if it's semi unfinished.

I don't want to force anybody to sign up for something and join a private group before they can watch their segments.

I own and administrate a domain associated with the project and would prefer to have it hosted by myself rather than a video sharing site but I don't know what format to encode it in because I want it to play right in the browser.

posted by keepmathy to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I don't want to force anybody to sign up for something and join a private group before they can watch their segments.

How much do you care about secrecy? Without passwords, it will be very difficult to prevent unauthorized people from viewing the videos. If you give each band a unique URL and run the site yourself you can probably control any leaks, although nothing will stop someone from making a copy and putting it on Youtube.

As for hosting it yourself your best bet is probably to create an FLV file, the Flash video format that sites like Youtube do. I've never created one myself so can't help there.
posted by Nelson at 1:43 PM on October 12, 2008

Yeah, unique url is the way to go. I'm only giving the url to bands so I don't think they'll be uploading it to youtube. I've never done this before but for some reason I thought I'd have to host some sort of a player for the flv.
posted by keepmathy at 1:53 PM on October 12, 2008

use google video.

You can upload a video, mark it as private, and share it using a long unique secret url that they give you. no membership req'd. There is also a Google video uploader for large files as well.
posted by dripped at 2:14 PM on October 12, 2008 [1 favorite]