Hello,

We have a website that plans to have user video content available for display to other users. Currently we support MPG files up to 8MB, because our file uploader has a maximum file size of 8MB. We'd like to get more video content, but the large file sizes of MPG seem prohibitive. We'd consider using AVI and WMV, but the codec problems seem to be nightmarish.

Ideally, we'd like flash, but it seems to be too difficult for our many users to consistently convert their videos to FLV for playback with a SWF.

We've researched conversion companies that charge per month for their service, where people upload videos in just about any format and it outputs a FLV file. However, we're looking for something that doesn't have a monthly charge.

We considered using FFMPEG but as we are on shared hosting (GoDaddy), we cannot install it, so that method is out.

Can anybody suggest a method for us to obtain video from our users, then be able to display them to other users in a consistent format? Or, can anyone suggest a way we increase the upload file limit from 8MB to something larger? Or, can anyone suggest any other process we could go through to obtain videos from users and then process them to a consistent format?

Thank you!

Video and low cost shared hosting don't go together.
The problems (FFMEG, 8MB limit) are imposed by the shared hosting.
I suggest switching to VPS (but more expensive).

Thank you for the suggestion, but we discovered that we could increase the upload limit by adding a php5.ini file to our root directory and adjusting the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size from 8M to our desired size.

To be honest, I think you're swimming against the tide here.

The majority of successful video sites (and hundreds of lame cloned youtube copy sites) allow large uploads of any format, and convert to /display in flv. By forcing users to jump through hoops by asking them to convert stuff themselves, you better hope they are well motivated and have no direct competing site to go to instead.

I'd recommend you can use heywatch.com for conversion (they have an easy to use api and can e.g ftp converted files) and only pay per conversion - a few cents.

You need to install a Flash video encoder engine on your host server, which can auto encode FLV for you. You can check this tutorial - h ttp://flash-video-player.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-to-make-video-sharing-website-like.html

The above link is just more blatant spam for moyea who are on the ffmpeg hall of shame for copyright infringement of free software and are notorious forum and blog spammers

Moyea has a lot of products. I don't know the other products of Moyea.But I bought a web player from Moyea to use it on my website and so far it works fine

I'd like to use youtube API