Watch our preview videos... please

[ccjax]

I have tossed the idea around of changing to Flash for the preview videos. But my biggest concern is that potential members can test the videos before they join... since the member's videos are WMV too. I'm trying to avoid the "I watched the videos on your tour but I can't play the videos in the member's area" kind of complaints.

I also want to avoid an additional layer of compression. Since I encode the original AVIs in Vegas. And since Vegas doesn't do Flash, I'd have to encode the preview into another format and then convert that into Flash.

I do like the idea of having the Flash video clickable straight to the join page though.

Jumping in a little late on this...
Did you consider streaming the preview content instead of progressive downloads? Especially for the previews - less buffering time and ffwd/rewind capabilities off the bat - not to mention saving bandwidth.

Here is it streamed from a CDN:
http://wmod.cdncon.com/a277/o2/drmnetworkswm/preview[1].wmv

Also, some of the streaming networks have built-in transcoding engines - for one-click transocding into multiple formats, including Flash.

[Xstr8guy]

Jumping in a little late on this...
Did you consider streaming the preview content instead of progressive downloads? Especially for the previews - less buffering time and ffwd/rewind capabilities off the bat - not to mention saving bandwidth.

Here is it streamed from a CDN:
http://wmod.cdncon.com/a277/o2/drmnetworkswm/preview[1].wmv

Also, some of the streaming networks have built-in transcoding engines - for one-click transocding into multiple formats, including Flash.

Interesting idea!

How about it Luke? Care to educate me on what is involved with a streaming server?