Help me get a client's video to play on his site

June 4, 2012 10:05 AM

I'm a part-time web designer. I've got some experience with video, but not a lot. I have a writer client who has a video trailer for one of his books. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get this thing to play nicely with browsers other than IE? Or should I just say the hell with it and put it on YouTube with links?

Do I need to stick it into a Flash container as an FLV or something? The video works just fine in IE, but gives me trouble in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome (have not yet tried Opera). I snagged the video and the page code to run it from his old site.

The original parameters:









The original embed:


Any ideas, folks?

Video here (on my test site): http://www.alsirois.com/2009/JEGurley/hellRigVideo.html

posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit to computers & internet (12 answers total)

Your code didn't show up properly.

But, there aren't a lot of drawbacks to just putting it on Vimeo and Youtube then embedding it. That way, they take care of all the conversion, and they handle the server load if a lot of people watch it.
posted by drjimmy11 at 10:12 AM on June 4, 2012

(Note that both YT and Vimeo offer embed code, so the video can still appear directly on his page, not just as a link. You should see the code somewhere available to be copied and pasted once you post the video)
posted by drjimmy11 at 10:12 AM on June 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

I use MediaElement.js and their home page has some good info on browser and device compatibility. It is really simple to use, and seems to work well on every device and browser I have tried it on.
posted by SNACKeR at 10:13 AM on June 4, 2012

(Sorry, I meant Vimeo *or* Youtube in my first response. Vimeo always looks a little more professional to my eye, but they both do the job perfectly)
posted by drjimmy11 at 10:13 AM on June 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

I see you are using WMV format. You'll likely want to use h.264 instead, converting with something like Handbrake.
posted by SNACKeR at 10:15 AM on June 4, 2012

Yeah, if you don't put it on YouTube you don't get the bonus of people being able to share and pass it around as easily, anyhow.
posted by steinsaltz at 10:23 AM on June 4, 2012

But, there aren't a lot of drawbacks to just putting it on Vimeo and Youtube then embedding it.

On the other hand, there are a lot of drawbacks to hosting it yourself. Odds are good you don't have the sort of web presence that can deliver a popular video to the internet without sending you an extremely exciting bandwidth bill just before it catches fire and melts.
posted by mhoye at 10:26 AM on June 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

My firm does a lot of online work with publishers. Almost everyone uses YouTube. Those who don't use Vimeo. There's no reason to host it yourself- you WANT it to be as public and findable as possible.
posted by mkultra at 11:27 AM on June 4, 2012

If you use a public site, be sure client is fine with that and be sure to ask whether client wants comments enabled or not.
posted by kalapierson at 11:44 AM on June 4, 2012

Okay, it's obvious my knowledge is out of date! No surprise there... I'll try sticking it up on YouTube or Vimeo and going for the embed.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 11:45 AM on June 4, 2012

Oh, and my bad on the code... I put it between <> brackets... duh.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 11:47 AM on June 4, 2012

He had the video on YouTube, and the embed worked perfectly. Thank you!
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 1:16 PM on June 4, 2012