Why buy video software such as Flowplayer and JWplayer? I don't get it...

by Altug
3 replies
Hey guys,

I'm going to be venturing into video quite a bit soon and I'm just stumped as to what the benefits of buying something like Flowplayer or JWplayer are?

I don't understand..why can you just upload the video somewhere and just embed it to your site? And where does Amazon s3 come into this? Can't you upload your vids to that site and embed from there to avoid your hosting becomiong extortionate?

I guess I just don't see where Flowplayer and JWplayer fit in? What are they and why do they sell?

Any information would be great as Google searches have left me confused as to the necessity of them

Thanks a million

Altug
#buy #flowplayer #jwplayer #software #video
  • Profile picture of the author Jill Carpenter
    In order to play video on your site, you need a player of some kind.

    Some video can be rendered out into a player of it's own - like camtasia. Some video formats you may want to use may need a different player.

    When you start to have a lot of video, it can take up resources on your server. If you are on a shared hosting program, the hosting companies can get a bit nasty about it. Even the "unlimited bandwidth and file space" are not truly unlimited.

    Loading videos to S3 allows you to load up as much media as you want and it is easy to stream that media to your site. In addition, should anyone hack into your site and mess with files, they won't be messing with the videos.

    If you have just one or two little videos, then go ahead and put them on your server. But if you are going to be doing LOTS of video, then you may want to store those elsewhere and stream in as needed.

    S3 is preferred because you only pay for what you use. A lot of other companies charge monthly flat rates.
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  • Profile picture of the author netw6000
    Altug:

    It's pretty simple... the purchased versions have more features that work. If you use it for commercial purposes, it is illegal to use the free version (technically).
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    • Profile picture of the author Toby Couchman
      Occasionally I build sites for government programs and corporates. There is no way that these organizations would want to post there private videos to YouTube or vimeo. So we host the video's locally and use jwplayer which has alot of great features by the way.
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