Encoding and publishing your video resource

There are several options available for delivering your video:

  1. On a CD or DVD - offers the advantage that high quality and long duration videos can be delivered with the confidence that all viewers who have the CD will be able to view the video. This option necessitates the logistics and expense of creating and distributing the CD/DVDs, which can then be damaged and lost. Once distributed, the author has little or no control over how the video resource is then used, shared, copied etc.
  2. Over the Internet as a "streamed" video - allows the video to be accessed anywhere and anytime so long as sufficient bandwidth is available to the viewer. "Streamed" video does mean that the quality and size of the video is limited to cope with the bandwidth available. Access and use of the video resource can be controlled to some extent via the access controls on the web server or available in systems such as a VLE or YouTube. There are several options for Internet videos.
    • Hosted on a video sharing site such as YouTube or Yahoo Video
    • Embedded into an Articulate presentation to allow integration with presentation slides, transcripts etc.
    • Published using AMP to synchronise the video with slides and transcripts and generate alternative accessible versions.
    • Hosted on the ISS streaming server.

Note on streaming versus progressive download

In option 2, the term "streamed" is used to refer to both the streaming and the progressive download of video over the Internet. True streaming video is delivered by a streaming server. Modern video formats and players also allow the progressive download of video files from standard web servers (i.e. not streaming servers. This approach also allows the viewer to begin watching the video file while it downloads. True streaming servers offer much better performance for significant numbers of viewers and can also match video quality with viewer bandwidth. (see Media College for more information on streaming and progressive download)

CD, DVD encoding and publishing

To create a DVD, the specific DVD publishing facilities offered by your video editing software should be used. These tools will help to create a DVD menu for accessing the various video chapters on the published DVD.

To create a CD, encode your video using a standard format such as WMV, MOV or MPEG and copy these files onto the CD. To facilitate the accessing of these video files you may wish to create a simple web page with links to each file and include this on the CD.

Media services can arrange the creation of large numbers of CDs or DVDs from one master copy.

Encoding and publishing on the Internet

Encoding - the final video file needs to be encoded into an appropriate size and format for its final delivery. This is usually done by your video editing software in the video publishing (or export) stage which will offer guidance on sizing for your expected bandwidth.

The main video formats appropriate for web delivery (delivery options 2&3) are:

  • Windows Media Video (WMV)
  • Quicktime (MOV)
  • Flash video (FLV)

Alternatively when you are using a web based video delivery service such as YouTube or Yahoo Video, this resizing and encoding of your video is provided as part of this service and so you can publish your edited video in any standard video format (e.g. MPEG, WMV or MOV) ready for upload (NB - the most recent versions of video editing software provide an option of direct video upload to YouTube avoiding the encoding and publishing steps of this process).

See the Media College for more information on video formats.

Web publishing - there are several options for "streamed" video publishing:

  1. Integration into a webpage or blog post where the video is displayed as part of the page.
  2. Link to video file from a webpage or blogpost, where a link has to be followed and the video is then played in isolation in a player.
  3. Embedding video within an Articulate presentation.

As mentioned earlier, on-line video services such as YouTube, Yahoo Video etc provide a simple to use system for uploading and delivering your video via the Internet. Once a video has been published on these systems, there will be a unique URL that can be used to view the video and often a segment of HTML code is also provided that can be used to embed the video into a web page or blog post.

Embedding a YouTube video in your Elgg blog - the Elgg system offers a facility to aid the embedding of such videos in your blog posts. Go to the video in YouTube (or Google video). Highlight and copy the embed code (in the box to the right of the main video). In Elgg create a new blog post. Click the Add external video button and paste the embed code into the text box. You may wish to alter the size the video is displayed. Click the Insert video button to add the video to the post.

Next - Further information