Feedback on embeded Amazon S3 Camtasia video in wordpress!

[Quentin]

I have been downloading plugins for weeks trying to find something that would allow me to add a camtasia video to wordpress 2.7 from Amazon S3 and have a photo on the front screen.

The problem is I wanted to embed it on the page but not have it start downloading till the customer started the play.

Here is what I have found and would really appreciate some feed back.

http://msibusiness.com/

Quentin

[Josh Anderson]

Hi Quentin,

If you ask me that feature is essential to any video publishing and I would not be satisfied until I found a player that allowed that control...

Of course we developed one that does all you just asked and a lot more for some of the same reasons that you just mentioned :-)

My thoughts about the JW player you are using and its behavior are that it looks pretty good. Your example actually behaves much better than most players I see used on blogs.

The only other thought I have about it is that for some reason it appears to be refreshing the cash every time stop is pressed and play is clicked. This means that if the video loads and the person watches part of it and presses stop and then presses play again to watch it later the video file is downloaded a second time.

While not a big deal to most low volume publishers it does add to your bandwidth bill and is entirely unecessary since the video is progressively downloaded for play via the player.

Progressive video players cache the video and should not refresh the cache unless necessary.

If you are using a service like S3 which is one of the most expensive video hosting solutions you can use then then you will pay every time a file is downloaded.

That means every time a visitor clicks play and then stop and then play again you are charged for loading the same file twice.

If you are a business doing high volume hosting with potentially viral video content or which may be watched more than once by the visitor you want to avoid having a player that refreshes the cache each time the video is played.

That could double or even triple your bandwidth bill depending on how fun the video is to watch ;-)

Of course if you are a low volume publisher and your content is not likely to be watched more than once by the same visitor or play, stop, played over and over then you are probably safe.

Also S3 should never be used for video hosting except in situations where you need to ensure unlimited bandwidth and you are willing to pay an unlimited bill.

You can get terabytes of bandwidth for under $10 a month from other high quality hosting providers such as Web Hosting: Dedicated & Shared Website Hosting Solutions - Aplus.net

In this thread I explain why S3 is not a smart choice (budget wise) for anyone publishing over 58gb and under 2Tb of bandwidth a month:

Amazon AWS - am I an idiot?

[Craig Desorcy]

Originally Posted by Quentin

I have been downloading plugins for weeks trying to find something that would allow me to add a camtasia video to wordpress 2.7 from Amazon S3 and have a photo on the front screen.

The problem is I wanted to embed it on the page but not have it start downloading till the customer started the play.

Here is what I have found and would really appreciate some feed back.

http://msibusiness.com/

Quentin

Same here Quentin. I've made it to the same place you have.

I'd like to hide where the video is coming from so I can host it in a
private membership site and not have it passed around the net.

This is going to take a little more time than expected.

Good post Josh.

Craig

[Josh Anderson]

I have been downloading plugins for weeks trying to find something that would allow me to add a camtasia video to wordpress 2.7 from Amazon S3 and have a photo on the front screen.

This is the plugin that I use with my player to accomplish that:

Wordpress Popup Plugin

It can be used with any player/content.

Its a dhtml layer plugin so it also works great for accomplishing the inclusion of video in any post or page. You can anchor the layer and you can trigger the the layer from an image or link.

[Quentin]

Thanks Josh I really appreciate your help.

I am getting a lot of people in my hosting program and they all wanted more on how to use things like wordpress etc so I have made all the videos and now just looking at ways to deliver the info.

Quentin