Video clips take to long to download whats wrong?

[The ND Group]

Can anyone help us? We have put some clips on a web site that are only 5 mins long but they are taking 10 mins to download.

1: do we need to compress them
2: whats the best program for compressing

They have been shot on a 3ccd HD Camera and formatted in Mpeg 2

please help

email tiffany@thendgroup.co.uk

[rgb]

How many MBytes are the actual files?

[The ND Group]

they range from 85Mb to 200Mb

[Twingo]

It could be several things.

1. It could be that the server your downloading them off is too slow, in which case you can either speak to the host or move to a new one. IE/Firefox both show the approx speed your getting from the web server, from all the sites ive joined recently the lowest speed ive seen is around 200KB a second, most seem to average around 500KB a second and the faster ones average around 1000KB a second +

2. It could be the file size of the movie is too big, you can reduce the bitrate, which would reduce the overall size, but you end up with lower quality movies, you should try with the movie at different bitrates to see what you can get away with, without affecting a drop in quality.

3. Use a better codec, WMV and H264/AVC if done correctly would give you the same quality but with lot less bandwidth, typically with H264 if done right, you can get away with using half as much bandwidth. Which means the consumer downloads half as less and so is faster for them and uses less resources your side.

[rgb]

The download speed is nothing to do with the length of the clip. Someone with a broadband connection of 2Mbit/s would take about 13 minutes to download your 200Mbyte clip.

The main limiting factor is still the customer's download speed. Many websites encode their videos in a range of sizes to give the customer a choice of download speed/quality. There are still lot of people with slowish broadband - if at all.

[Twingo]

[quote]The download speed is nothing to do with the length of the clip. Someone with a broadband connection of 2Mbit/s would take about 13 minutes to download your 200Mbyte clip[/quote]

Thats assuming the webserver gives you the full 2Mbit. For such a low speed broadband thats very likely, but when you get faster broadband, you typically end up faster than the hosting server and so you have to take into account the download speed of the webserver.

[rgb]

Of course it depends on server load at the time and most small porn sites are on 10Mbit/s or 25Mbit/s peak servers so you don't want all your members downloading at the same time!

But, yes the general rule is keep the file size as low as possible for acceptable quality.