Housing lots of video files and info on a server

[Mark Carrara]

Server space is probably NOT an issue. Hard drives are cheap. You are talking about a few hours of video. Say 1000 three minute videos equals fifty hours. You could get that on 500 gb as an AVI file. While that seems like a lot of space I just purchased 640 gb NAS for under $3k. And you will be using compressed videos for the Internet, I don’t know how compressd they are but you will not need a huge hard drive. Bandwidth IS an issue. I’m sure there are hosting companies that would love to sell you all the bandwidth you can afford. I know there are less expensive hosting companies, but I am using Interland. No reason other than laziness, I don’t feel like changing. Atomic Learning is a site that comes to mind doing something similar. Check them out and see how they work. I think they used PDF documents and Flash videos.

[Doug Cannonday]

I think a problem in your future might be the size of your files to be downloaded.

I too am building a site with much video media and graphics available for users to download.

To to this my media needed to be compressed into a streaming format for viewing over the web.

I don’t think your clients will want to wait for large media files over and over again while viewing.

I start with a fine full-featured DVD format then I compress these files using a video editor into wmv files which stream over the web using the Windows Media Player.

I plan to allow free (and fast) viewing of the compressed files and purchase of the full DVDs

So now i get to store two formats for each video offered but as mentioned space really is not an issue these days