Troubles Viewing/Hosting Video On Your Site?

With the proliferation of multimedia on the internet and the ease of capturing and displaying videos on blogs and websites, more and more authors are electing to show everything from book trailers to interviews on their site. Web surfers are buying computers that are more and more powerful making the ability to view these videos relatively a common and easy thing to do.

However, we are in the midst of a technology change that is affecting the ability for some people to view videos. As marketers, you need to be aware of these changes. Now, I am not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some problems that I have run across with the videos that I create for my Video Marketing Tips For Authors Newsletter that I want to share with you. Whether you host or view videos, you will learn some important things here.

First, there are two basic ways to share your videos on the web.

1. Upload to a video site. Sites like YouTube and Viddler.com (among a host of others) allow you to upload your created videos for free and then select their embedded link to paste on your blog or website. The video plays on your site but is streamed from their servers.

2. Upload to your server. A more complex method, but one that gives you more control, is to upload your video directly to your website. These videos play from your server and use bandwidth, so you want to make sure that you have enough bandwidth allotted from your server or you may have your site shut down for the remaining of the month or incur extra band with usage charges.

Regardless of what you choose, technology is upgrading and video on the net is actually struggling to stay up. Be aware of these issues.

1. Vista for Windows runs on a new 64 bit system, up from the 32 bit system from XP. All you need to know about this is that as of the time of this writing, Flash, the language most videos are now translated into, does not work on a 64 bit browser. That means your viewers will have to open a 32 bit browser to view the video. Fortunately, Microsoft includes both a 32 bit and a 64 bit Internet Explorer browser with their 64 bit operating systems.

For example, if you try to watch a YouTube video on a 64 bit browser, you will get this message:

"Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player."

However, the problem is worse, because when you click to upgrade your version of flash, you get problem number 2:

2. Adobe has not yet created a version of Flash to operate on a 64 bit system. Here is the message you get when you try to upgrade your Flash on a 64 bit browser:

Flash Player support on 64-bit operating systems Issue

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Adobe Flash Player is not supported for playback in a 64-bit browser. However, you can run Flash Player in a 32-bit browser running on a 64-bit operating system.

Reason

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Adobe is working on Flash Player support for 64-bit platforms as part of our ongoing commitment to the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player. We expect to provide native support for 64-bit platforms in an upcoming release of Flash Player following Flash Player 10.

Solution

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To use Flash Player to view Flash content on a 64-bit operating system, you must run a 32-bit browser.


So you are in a vicious circle until these two technology giants get in lock-step with one another. I mention this to hopefully help you understand the issues and help your visitors avoid frustration when you post your videos.

The good news is that 64 bit systems are the future and it will be a relatively short time before these issues go away. Until then, you need to be ready to offer a work-around for your visitors.

3. Not all browsers display videos the same way. This has nothing to do with the 32 bit/64 bit question. While Marketing Tips For Authors looks for simple, low cost solutions to problems for authors on a shoestring budget, sometimes it's best to call in the experts. I had an issue where Firefox would show the videos I created on my web page with no problems, but Internet Explorer 8 would not (Other versions of IE worked with no problems). I contacted Microsoft and they informed me, grudgingly, that it would take an update to IE8 for their current browser to work on my site.

My work around was a simple one. I was able to point visitors to a web site that hosted the videos without the other text from my site and IE8 works just fine, but many people may not be as lucky. It's then that you may need to think about calling in the web design experts to help you with your website.

(If you want to see how I handled the IE8 issue, check out the bottom of my video sign-up page).

I know that this article had a lot of techie stuff, but as marketers, sometimes we can not avoid dealing with this types of issues. They can cause a tremendous headache for both us and our viewers. Hopefully this article will at least give you some understanding if you are dealing with video issues- enough to perhaps offer solutions that work for your visitors.

Tony Eldridge