Dear Readers, I am a novice to RW I’ve created about 3 websites and have the basic understanding of how this works. With that said, I have been having issues with loading speed of my video section. Background, I am photographer/video guy and wanted to have 12 or videos 5 min or less on this page. I have scaled all the videos to 650x360 pixels in mp4 and a second version in webm.
I’ve tried hosting the videos on my shared hosting company and Amazon s3, however, the videos are very slow to load (meaning the front page is taking a long time to load). I don’t understand what causes slow downs other than I’m on a shared hosting site but if anyone has knowledge I’d appreciate it.
If it matters, I am using Nick Cates IRIS template and Will’s Stacks4stacks (player) to handle the videos.
I have a free vimeo account and if any of you use that let me know…
You cannot get much better than Amazon S3 for video storage and serving. The cost versus the streaming speed is really good. That’s why Netflix and some of the other big guys use Amazon servers for their infrastructure.
It does not matter if your actual website is on shared hosting. It is where the video comes from and how it’s served to the end user that’s most important.
I would start by looking at the preloading of the video. If you have lots of video starting to load simultaneously as the page opens, then that will certainly cause a log-jam effect and burn lots of unnecessary bandwidth. Setting preloading to ‘meta’ or ‘none’ could bring a significant performance boost. It means the video will only start loading on demand, as the ‘play’ button is clicked.
Even on a slower-than-average internet connection, the video should play reasonably well with little or no buffering. At the end of the day, Player stack, Vimeo, YouTube and all the countless other video services out there are nearly always using MP4 / WebM video, with only subtle differences in the file formats used. For example if you download a YouTube video, it comes in MP4 format.
@manofdogz Each to their own. But the cost, censorship and privacy issues of third-party video sharing sites is too much of a compromise for quite a number of people publishing video on a professional basis.
I don’t know where you have dug-up your video compatibility data from, but MP4 works in all major web browsers:https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4
I’ll bow to your superior knowledge - this is a bit out of date - a lot more than I realised so best to delete! However this still highlights an issue that I certainly used to experience, namely that things change and self hosting means you have to keep an eye out for compatibility. Having said that I’m sure thangs are more standardised than they used to be. Nevertheless personally I’d sooner let the Vimeos of this world take care of that.