Video hosting and bandwidth questions

[orthohin]

I've grown tired of uploading my short videos, (typically 3-15 minutes in length and around 30-90 mb in size) to video hosting sites like YouTube, BlipTV, Vimeo, etc.  I don't have the control over them that I would like, or able to make an interesting looking "show" page where all of my videos can be viewed.

Because of this, I thought about just making a subsite of my website, where visitors could just click on the videos they want to watch and stream them from my website, where I would upload my videos to the lunarpages server.

My questions are, 1) Is this a feasible idea?  Would it take up too much bandwidth for visitors to steam the video?  I know it would be based on the amount of users. 2) Are there any other thoughts on the subject from anyone else doing the same thing? 

Thanks!

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Orthohin

[Sogo7]

Yes, it can be done.

However as you have already guessed there are going to be problems with

how many videos you can keep on site at any time

This number is less than you think.. the new HTML5 video standards are anything but and to make sure that any visitor can watch a video regardless of their PC operating system requires THREE copies of the file using different formats. OGG, MP4 and FLV

Did You Know ? Youtube has a special developers section that allows you to do more than just embed a video into your own websites pages here is a basic  demo messing around with buttons to control playlists.

Video files such as those found on YouTube are not streamed, it is actually  a progressive download . Every visitor gets the video delivered to their web browser from the begining. Streaming is like turning on a radio or TV and finding the show is half way through and visitors cannot rewind. Streaming also requires special software to be installed at the server and most webhosts only allow this sort of thing on a dedicated or VPS(Virtual Private Server).

If you have a good domestic  broadband connection then you can stream media to the web from a home PC using the VLC media player (I do it once a year at Christmas for a laugh) but running a server at home is not for everyone.