Questions about video codec and internet download protocol

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Okay since SPS account holder can have a simple 250 MB space over the web, I want to use it for a project. For the past three years I've studied cinema in college and as such I've made several short movies, three in fact. Up to a total of 25 minutes. About 800-1000 MO in standard Avi format.

I want to made them available on the web for download. But several questions arises.

Trivia; I've asked the coordinator of the program, and even though the college is the "official" holder of the movie right, I'm allowed to distribute them freely. It makes sense too it could help boost the reputation of the college and make people aware of the program.

1) - Which video codec to use? Obviously with 250MB I will have to compress them. I want to use an open source format, since I'll do this stuff on my Linux box. And frankly I dislike proprietary source in general. And It'll prevent me of spending money too. Also a cross platform format too, I want anyone to watch them regardless of OSes they use. Also quite important is a good quality : size ratio. I'm not foolish to think quality won't be lost in the process.

I've heard some good thing about Matroska Multimedia Container *.mkv A codec used by VLC (Video Lan media player) and also open source and cross platform. So far it seems a reasonably good choice. Also, *.mkv is supported by other media player to accommodate the viewer.

Trivia: Two of them (one 5 minutes the other 10 minutes) are both in SD (Standard definition) and 4:3 NTSC. While the other (10 minutes) is in 16:9 SD.
All of them are encoded in 48 kHz stereo sound. I assume none of this will be a problem when re-encoded on my computer, but just wanted to make sure.

2) Which download protocol to use? Frankly the only one I *know* is FTP ( know is a big word, in fact I pretty much know nothing about it) Of course I could use Bittorrent and while it would pretty much nullify the space limitation i would be required to seed the thing and my personal bandwidth is quite limited.

3) I also know pretty much nothing about HTML and web design, I'm pretty sure there's a Linux software out there that could help me, but alas I know none of them.

Well, that's it folks.

 

1) - I've searched and found that Xvid is open source while Divx isn't. I'll consider Xvid - but my priority is open source and a good quality : size ratio. It may sounds stupid but having an open source codec is important to me. So I'll test both matroska and Xvid (matroska being a recent favourite of mine)

2) Great, then I'll definitively use FTP

3) Cool, thanks for the link

 

1) .mkv sounds kind of good to me (after reading the wikipedia article), but it seems...a bit obscure. You may want to look into which players can handle it (is it just vlc?); whilst many people use vlc, many still do not and may be limited to say Windows Media player or the like. PS3's, 360's and some dvd players can play back divX and Xvid files, so this may be something to take into consideration.

2)You might want to research FTP a bit - you'd primarily use it to upload files from your computer to a specific site (in this case SP) where it would be given a URL address. The downloader would then just need to click on the link to download it just like any other file on the net. There are plenty of html/java based FTP programs, but I'd personally recommend a client based one such as Filezilla (open source, 2.35mb) - it uses a fairly intuitive drag and drop interface, similar to the tree view of windows explorer.

3)Tal's html editor link looks to be a winner. If you want to try something a bit more advanced you could give NVU a shot (open source, supports linux/windows, includes an ftp client so can edit and update all pages in real time).

If you want to play around with a few more formats you could give Media Coder; I don't know if it's open source, but its free, runs on Windows and Linux and has plenty of options (effecting bitrate, time to code, audio etc) and formats (Xvid, mpeg, flash etc) to play around with.

 

1) - VLC is a great player, but it's not as popular as it should be. However, .mkv is still too obscure. Go with diviX for more versatility.

2) - Use FTP to put the files on your site. As for downloading, I'd add a media player to your site so people can either watch the full length version, or a preview clip. Then, if you want, add a link for a direct download.

3) - There's a thread in the SPS forum that helps a lot. I could help as well from my tinkering with editing media for web use, along with making my site. Also, see if you can get a student discount on Dreamweaver 8. I haven't tried Dreamweaver CS3, but that's going to be a lot more expensive, and might be overkill for people new to HTML. DR8 is a great program though...it makes CSS web design a breeze. I used DR8 to help teach me HTML...