A friend of mine is setting up a new site for independent filmmakers, and he wants people to be able to upload their own videos; sort of like YouTube. Does anyone know where he can get the software to do that?
It’s pretty much standard coding for the web. You’ll need special coding in order to actually take the file and make it ready for display, and if you’re going to do that, the uploading would come along with it.
But here’s some help.
No coffee yet, so I haven’t even attempted to read the code. but I’ve sent the link to my friend. Thanks!
Uploading it is the easy part, displaying it like YouTube is extremely difficult. Without physical access to the server and the ability to load custom software on there, he’s probably not going to be able to get it done.
YouTube takes all sorts of videos, created at all sorts of sizes and ratios, compressed with all sorts of different codecs, and converts them into a standard FLV file for simple importing into Flash movies (which is all that YouTube player is, by the way). While setting up an upload/view movie area would be relatively simple, converting them the way YouTube does is an extremely, extremely difficult task.
How do they do it?
Right now he’s accepting films via email in the following formats: .mov, .divx, .asf, .dv, and .wmv (maximum length 15 minutes, feature films must be chunked up into 15 minute segments, no porn). He’ll have to upload them manually. I don’t know in which format he intends to show them. Obviously it would be a lot less work if people could just upload their own.
They do it with what I’m sure is automated proprietary software installed on their own servers, so when someone uploads something it sends it through this software to convert it into a common file type.
If all he wants to do is get them to upload their own videos and make them available to download in their original format, that’s a piece of cake. Any kind of server-side conversion is going to be tough.