Adding video to your website , go on make that radio star pay.
Greetings and Salutations.
Thirty years ago a green cursor flashing on a green background was considered an event worthy of gathering the family around the table. Times have changed and people will now gather around to look at someone using green backgrounds to create video that was impossible thirty years ago, cutting edge twenty years ago, and expensive at the turn of the millennium. Today, video can be created on your home computer with footage derived from a relatively inexpensive camcorder.
Website Tonight has two main ways to add video to your web pages. You can add your own video files or add videos from online services.
Presently we support the upload of the following formats: WMV, AVI, and MPG. However, you can get practically any format that QuickTime supports to appear. AVI is not recommended, as it is a large file format in relation to the other choices. There are free encoders, which you may already own. I suggest using an encoder to convert the AVI into another format prior to uploading (unless you have a specific need for AVI on your site).
How to add your own Video from a file.
To add your own video, begin by selecting the page you want to add the video to, and then create a content block. Select the block you just created and click Content Options. Select insert object and then video. On this screen you can either reference a file you previously uploaded, load a file from your computer, or enter the URL if the video's on line. Once the file is in place, you can visit the properties tab and set the Width and Height according to the type of material you are showing. For standard video, 320W x 240H or 400W x 300H will keep the same 4:3 ratio as most material shown on a conventional screen. For widescreen format, 400W x 225H creates a 16:9 ratio. Click OK when you have completed setting you Width and Height, then click OK to save the content block.
A Tip
If you have .MOV or MP4 files, try renaming them to an .mpg extension and then uploading them. This should work if visitors to your site have the correct player installed in their browsers. (If not, a blue question mark will display). Another option is to convert the video into another format or upload it to a video sharing site such as You Tube, and then use the following steps to add it to your page.
How to add videos from Online services.
This method works with most of the popular video sharing sites such as You Tube, Revver, and Metacafe. To add a video from an online service, you will need to locate the embed/sharing code. You Tube's displays this under each video on their site. To copy the code, right click on the code and select copy.
From the WebSite Tonight Page Designer, select the block you want to add the video to. You can create a new block or use an existing one. From the Toolbox, select Table and Objects > Insert Object > Script, and then Paste the embed code. You can usually adjust the height and width within the code at this point, but keep in mind that when you resize the video, the width to height ratio must remain the same or you risk cutting off some of the content.
Note: If the site you are using provides a code that starts <object>, the video may not function. Basically, most video services using an embed tag should work but please bear in mind there are hundreds of video services and testing them all is impractical. If you encounter an issue with a service, let me know and I'll take a look at it. Until next time.
I have enjoyed working with website tonight and found it really easy to create our website very quickly. Good work! I have only one question/comment: I have only 50MB of disk space to work with in my chosen package which, for my type of website should be plenty. I keep showing that I'm over my alloted space even though I've deleted back-ups and images. Is there a way to see where the disk space is being used and can we get timely updates on disk space usage after we modify our sites? This is driving me crazy!!! Help!
Sheril
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Sheril,
To find out how much diskspace and B/w are currently in use you can click on the Home button within WST and the right hand side of the screen has the account. If that's the one it's updated on a nightly cycle so the space should be available to you already. If there's still issues let me know and I'll see where the jam is.
Regards
John
WST team.
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Hey John, when is GoDaddy going to upgrade the message board, so the administrator has more control over users, searches, and the dashboard? The board is very user-friendly, but I want to add to the dashboard and to each forum -- maybe some Google adsense ads, for example. How about blogging on this topic.
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Greetings Mark,
It was coming up , honest, ok, you caught me out a forum article was a few weeks out but I can always write two this week
More control, e.g the min number of characters to search, or searches per hour or something altogether different? Control over users that's a rather large topic in itself so again let me know and when we're addressing the issue we'll have more to consider.
Regards
John
WST team.
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Hey, John, sorry to steal your thunder on the upcoming forum blog. What I really want to do is be able to put google ads on all forum pages and in the header and footer areas of all pages. This requires javascript -- the code that Google provides when you set up your ads.
In terms of user capabilities, it would be nice if there was a search mode installed, so all users can search for other users' posts. So if I search for John, I can get all of his posts or his most recent posts or something like this. Plus, the users are not organized alphabetically, which would help the administrator.
To me, though, the google adsense piece is most important. I can generate solid income at my forum, which gets a ton of daily traffic.
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Mark,
No problem I have a pool of ideas that I'm going to get to , I have about 2 half written posts at any given time. I totally agree that search is needed and it's next on the roadmap for future inclusion.The ability to monetize ( tastefully I hope) the traffic is also up for disussion. With regards to the user name one model I like is when you see a user name there's a few links heading out from it to their profile, posts or contact info. As to user management that should be searchable with the ability to order results e.g a-z by sign up date, number of posts etc all of which are being considered for a future version.
Regards
John
WST Team
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Using WebSite Tonight, the uploading of the movie file works well, but I can't seem to find a way to turn off the autostart option. That is, as soon as you hit the page with the movie, it starts playing.
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Greetings,
This is a behavior that I've asked to make optional when it's uploaded via us. When it comes to embedding video files from other sites that may very much depend on the service itself and how they have it set up to share. I'd need some more information to give you a complete answer on this.
Regards
John
WST team
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I want to add several videos on a page and display the number of hits each video receives. Does anyone know how?
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Dear Thomas,
Unfortunately, we can not do this with Website Tonight. However you can put each video on a separate page and have a hit counter on that page. This way you will be able to count number of times that page has been viewed.
Thanks
Sanjay
WST Team
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Hi Guy's,
My question is directed at any of the WST Team members. I would like to insert a screen cast into my website and can't seem to find any info on hoow to do this. I have video content which was derived from some old svhs tapes converted to dvd then converted to mpeg4 and then converted to swf files to compress them. I used V2F to compress the video. The files also contain music. In the V2F program I was able to compress the file from 240mb down to 23mb. The program also produces a player. So the end product is 2 SWF files, 1 video, 1 player file and a txt File with the html script. Is it possible to create a screen cast within Web Site Tonight? If it is possible where would I get this info? The web site was designed to sell a piece of property on the Klamath river and the video's are absolutely necessiary. Your help with this would be greatly appreciated. If this is not the appropriate venue for such questions, I appologize. Maybe you could steer me in the right direction.
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Hi Jim,
If you have already created the .swf files, then i will recommend you to insert them using 'Insert Flash" feature of the website tonight. This can be accessed from the 'Flash' button on the toolbar (on the top). A screen will appear which will ask you to upload your flash files. Upload your .swf files from there. Select the desired file from the dropdown and click 'OK' at the bottom.
Please let us know, if you need any assistance.
Thanks and regards,
Sanjay
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