Self-Hosting Your Own Video LP

So you want to self-host your own video LP. There are many ways to do this.

What you'll need

 * Web Space
 * Bandwidth
 * Know how to upload files to your website (SCP recommended, or FTP if necessary)
 * A video player script

There are many different video player scripts. The old standby is JWPlayer, which is "free" but apparently involves creating a "LongTail Video" account now.

A new option (and the option I'm going to go with for this guide) is the HTML5-based video.js.

The Basics
video.js is based on HTML5. This means that in supported browsers, no additional plugin is needed. (Supported browsers in this case means Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox on certain operating systems.)

video.js provides a complete tutorial but the basics are:

Add the following to the  in your HTML page:

 

Then, where you want the video to appear on the HTML page, add the following:

 &lt;source src="/your/lp/video.mp4" type='video/mp4'> &lt;source src="/your/lp/video.webm" type='video/webm'> &lt;source src="/your/lp/video.ogv" type='video/ogg'>

And that's it. Well - that's almost it.

The Required Files
You might notice that in the above block, there are four files: the  "poster" image, and three video files. The three video files are different encoding of the video and are required to support all browsers on all OSes. If you don't care about supporting all browsers on all OSes (and you might as well not) you can skip the WebM and Ogg versions. You can also skip those because you won't find any examples of how to make those on this Wiki.

The "poster" image is the image that shows before the video is played. It's effectively the same as the YouTube "thumbnail" image.

The MP4 video is simply an MP4 encoded video that you created as described elsewhere on this wiki. Any MP4 video will work, although "streamable" MP4 videos are recommended. (Most encoders create streamable videos by default.)