AndyB Posted February 10, 2008 Share Posted February 10, 2008 I have a new client whose business is 'voice-overs'. Client has all sorts of clips from TV and radio advertising plus some video shorts as well. Apparently, I can (probably) get most of this stuff in whatever format I prefer to use on the web site. I'm sensitive to bandwidth usage (since I operate multi-domain reseller hosting) but need reasonable quality for the web materials for these audio and video things, i.e. I don't want multi-Mb downloads. What formats might make the most sense for audio and video? What 'players' might I need for them? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted February 10, 2008 Share Posted February 10, 2008 While it's not very popular, the Ogg Vorbis audio format has much better compression than the "standard" MP3. This means that you get the same quality at lower bit-rates, and lower bit-rates imply lower filesizes. Very few proprietary players play OGG files, but nearly every Free media player does. (I always suggest VLC for playing all media files, so I suggest VLC for this, as well.) OGG is a Free media format, so encoders and decoders are a dime-a-dozen. (Actually free-a-dozen, but that just didn't sound as cool.) My recommendation for video format is Xvid. Xvid is a high-performance and high-quality MPEG-4 codec, and, like OGG, is a Free format. (It still uses MPEG-4, which is not Free, but it's close enough for our purposes.) Like Ogg Vorbis, encoders and decoders are usually absolutely free, and in some cases, are even included with major media players. (I believe WIndows Media Player supports Xvid-encoded files.) Again, a completely Free media player is VLC - I think you'll find that VLC can play whatever you want to throw at it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tibberous Posted February 10, 2008 Share Posted February 10, 2008 If you use a weird format, your going to have shitty compatibility. Convert all video to FLV, all audio to mp3, and play it all with Flash - just charge him for what he's going to use. My site uses one gig a day in bandwidth, just to play this video: http://www.osflv.com/Demonstration.html It's 3.5 meg. But I pay $58 a month for 500 gig of data transfer. Just charge him like $10-20 a month, bandwidth doesn't cost that much. If your afraid it will screw up your other accounts, I'll host his videos on my server for $10 a month Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stooney Posted February 10, 2008 Share Posted February 10, 2008 Just throwing it out there, with 1and1.com linux business package you get 2500gb bandwidth for $10/month. You could use it strictly to host the files, and his current webspace for the actual site. There's probably better deals, but this is one that I know of off the top of my head. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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