I never looked into this before, as don’t have a video camera, but a friend gave me a DVD of the footage (that dates me, but don’t know what to call it) he shot at my wife’s big surprise birthday party.
Rather than burn a whole mess of DVDs to send to family and friends, am wondering if there is any way I can creaate a link to this so others can watch it.
It is about 1.4 GB and runs 22 minutes. I Googled, and found most sites like You Tube, Fickr, Google, etc limit videos to about ten minutes, or one gig.
I don’t even have a program that will let me copy it from the DVD to my HDD (Roxio won’t do it), so any advice as to how I can get it to some place with a link so others can watch?
I do have a pretty fast cable broadband connection, if that is of any revelence.
Youtube allows larger videos now. (I think I’ve seen vids longer than an hour on there)
You can DEFINITELY get 20 mins to under a Gig. Most AHEM…COUGHillegalCOUGH films are under a gig. You’ll need to look into video encoding software.
My anwer is mainly to point out that youtube’s ten minute limit no longer seems to exist. I am sure others will have better advice than I about the getting the file off the dvd bit.
You can get a freeware streaming server I’m sure, or re-encode that video (you should be able to get it under 100 Mb with decent quality by using an mp4 codec like xvid or divx, or WMAV) and host the file, either from your own PC or from a web host that probably won’t cost you more than the amount the DVD’s it would take to distribute it that way would set you back.
It’s not really a question of how many minutes long it is since video can be encoded with very low to very high quality. A 15 minute High Definition video takes considerably more space than a 2 hour movie that has been ultra-compressed. Either way, even with a pretty good connection speed between wherever you host the file and your guests computers (lets say 640,000 bps, pretty decent speed for the average DSL) it would take about 5 hours for your guests to receive the entire 1.5 GB movie wherever you hosted it. And some poor slob with a 56k modem would need about 65 hours to receive it. To copy the movie from the DVD to your hard drive is simple, just look for any of a billion tools for doing so (google “RIP DVD”) and look for programs for your particular operating system; there are many free ones available. Once you have the data on your hard drive, as mentioned you could recode it to a lower quality video that is much smaller, or segment it into smaller pieces using zip or rar, and make them available for download on file hosting sites (mega upload, rapidshare, etc.). Your guests would then need to reassemble the pieces and uncompress the file back into the original movie. This system seems to be workable for kids trying to copy illegal movies and CD’s but for guests of a birthday party it might prove a bit too time consuming and complicated. Personally I would burn DVD’s and mail them out. If not, you should probably encode the movie to a much, much lower quality so that the 20 minute segment is more like 100MB (1/15 the current size) and that file could easily be hosted on Youtube or other video hosting sites.
Edit: I do recommend ripping the movie off your DVD, I am not sure if MediaCoder can read off of them correctly.
Press the first button with the + on it. Choose your file from disk/hard drive if you downloaded it there.
In the bottom pane, click Generic. Change your output folder so it’s on your hard drive, not the disk.
In the bottom pane, click Video. Format: XviD is just fine. H.264 might result in your file being too big: 500MB is the limit for a good video hosting website I recommend below.
In the bottom pane, click Container. Container: AVI is good.
Click the START button. Wait for it to finish!
Press the button that has a play button with an arrow on it. This will play back your encoded video. If it looks bad, you can try messing around with other options in the Video tab.
Head to www.viddler.com and register an account (free, no spam crap, no worries). Log in.
Hover your mouse over VIDEOS up top, and choose Simple Upload. Choose your file, fill in the boxes as appropriate. WAIT a while and it’ll finish.
Use the URL of your video to send to family. It can be watched without an account, although occasionally little pop up ads appear on the videos (closeable, just like youtube).
Thanks to all for some very interesting information. I’ll think about burning more DVDs, but hoped to avoid the hassle of packing them up and mailing.
Toaster, you made my day with that detailed and comprehensive post. I have copied your instructions, printed it out, and will certainly give that a try. I’llvisit the sites you linked. Many thanks!