Putting my Videos Online

I've been hold off writing about the second week of our holiday in Scotland last month because I took video rather than stills and I wanted to be able to show those on the Web. I've not this before and it took me a while to find a solution as I really didn't want to use YouTube or similar.

So much respect to Ramin for leading the way on this. As part of our work on putting up the videos from the first Angioma Alliance UK International Forum (which I missed as we were in Scotland) he pointed me to FlowPlayer, a free Flash video player which allows you embed flash videos into your web page.

Of course this isn't the whole story. My new video camera, a lovely little JVC Everio with a 30GB hard drive rather than removable media, produces MPEG files (although with a .mod extension, just to confuse the unwary) and normally one would use ffmeg to convert it to Flash video but my version of ffmeg doesn't recognise the audio codec so I have to run in through mencoder first to sort out the audio, then push the resulting AVI file through ffmpeg to produce a letterbox format Flash video file. Here's a code fragment from the shell script I'm using in case it helps anyone.

mencoder -oac mp3lame -ovc copy $INFILE -o $TMPFILE
ffmpeg -i $TMPFILE -padtop 30 -padbottom 30 -padcolor 000000 \
   -s 320x180 -ar 44100 -r 12 $OUTFILE

Having got that far I was then left wondering how to present the videos and extending the code I'd already got for presenting photos seemed like the answer. So here at last are the videos of our holiday of Gairloch. I can even mix still photos and videos in the same album, although that didn't apply to this holiday.

I would be interested to know what you think of these videos and the way they're being presented. I'm also whether to put the originals online too - these are MPEGs so you need something that could play them, but they are 580x1024 pixel and big files (to take one at random the Flash file is 1.5MB but the MPEG is 33MB).