I know a guy who needs to stream video from his blog for users. I searched your blog and did not find anything.It’s a 12 second video in MPEG format. What’s the best way to stream video? Should it be in a particular format?

This question came to me recently from a reader. As an online information consultant, my initial answer to the question is, “it depends.”

There is more than one way to put video on a blog. The blogging software or service you are using will determine what type of code you can place on your pages and whether there are special tools available to facilitate the process. (If you want a quick step-by-step without the details, scroll to the bottom of the page.)

I use Wordpress for this blog and have a plugin installed called vPIP. It assists me in generating the code required to embed a file on a web page and works with Quicktime, Windows Media, and Flash video. I enter the address of the video file and a placeholder graphic, select a few options, and click on the ‘Generate Code’ button. I copy the code, paste it into my web page, and I’m done - but the video is not streaming! What???

There are two types of video delivery available on the web: Progressive Download and Streaming. Behind the scenes there is a big difference how they work to get a video delivered. But to the user, the results are nearly identical.

Streaming Video requires a special streaming server to handle the delivery of the video files (it costs significant money.) Streaming means that the video is displayed as it is delivered. Other than a small amount of buffering, the video is not stored on your local computer. If you want to rewind the playback, the server resends the video. The Streaming Server also monitors the connection speed and can adjust the playback quality and frame rate up and down to maintain the playback rate (if you have ever watched a video that suddenly freezes on a frame, but the audio keeps going, you’ve seen the effect of this.)

A key benefit of streaming is copy protection. The complete video file is not stored on the users computer so it can not be copied and redistributed.

Progressive Downloads don’t require a special server. When a user watches a Progressive Download, the media player begins downloading the video file and storing it on the local hard drive. The player gets a headstart on the download and starts playing the video before the download is complete. If the connection speed remains good and the playback doesn’t catch up with the download, the video will play uninterrupted to the end. Since it is stored on the local hard drive, the video can be replayed without having to resend data from the server.

The key benefits of Progressive Downloads are that it is cheap and the playback quality is consistent once the video is downloaded.

Most likely you will find yourself using Progressive Downloads. The sample video below is a Progressive Download Windows Media Format file embedded in the page via the vPIP plugin for Wordpress. Just click the picture to start the video.

Play Windows Media version

So How Do I Put A Video On My Blog???

If you don’t have Wordpress with the vPIP plugin, here is a good old fashioned way to code the video into your site using the Object and Embed HTML tags:

• Step 1: Convert Your Video to either Quicktime, Windows Media, or Flash format using your video editing software or a program like Cleaner.
• Step 2: Upload the video to your web server via FTP (if you are using a hosted blog and don’t have FTP access to your website, you may need to find a seperate server space to store yuor video files. You can also use a service like YouTube.com to host your video.)
• Step 3: Modify the sample code below with the web address and dimensions of your video file
• Step 4: Copy the code and paste it into your webpage

Sample code for Embedding a Windows Media File:

If you have problems placing code into your blog pages, first check to see whether your content entry tool is modifying the code when saving. Most blog tools strip out tags and may require you to wrap the HTML in a special set of tags to prevent filtering.

Notes: When setting the dimensions for your file, remember to account for the size of the playback controls. If you don’t, they will overlap your video and cover a portion of it (some of the Flash control styles are designed this way and are semi-transparent.)

Also, there are two entries for the filename and dimensions in the code. One in the