Comments

ralftaro wrote on 6/18/2009, 6:40 AM
Hi,

The answer to this question mostly depends on how exactly you want to integrate the video into your site, i.e. what technical solution you had in mind. Is it going to by some kind of Flash-based playing application that you embed into your site and that can play MPEG-4 or Flash video type files? Are you just going to use the video embedding function of HTML? Are you using a presentation site like YouTube or are you even using the Magix online services (such as Website Maker and Online Album) to present your video? Are you just going to host the video on the site, so it will quickly download and play in a local application when clicking on it?

Generally, different video formats are suitable for online streaming use. Modern and highly compressed formats are preferable. If the visitors are supposed to play the video locally, you need to go for a very common and compatible format (e.g. MPEG-1 or WMV). Video upload sites like YouTube will accept a wide variety of source formats, e.g. WMV, MPEG-2 or DivX. They will be processed and converted to Flash video on the server to make sure fluent online streaming is possible. There's even an Internet option in the "File" menu of PhotoStory, where you can export directly to the Magix Online Album. The file will also be trancoded on the server. The resulting FLV file can be downloaded again and presented on your own webspace, using a suitable Flash playing application.

As you can see, it's a little more complicated and depends on what exactly you had in mind. I hope this gives you a rough idea, though.

ralftaro wrote on 6/20/2009, 9:34 AM
Hi again,

As far as the website of that bridal store is concerned, are you referring to this kind of slide show?

http://www.eugeniacouture.com/realbrides.html

That's the only one I could find. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough. 

It's a Flash application embedded into the site, but it doesn't look like it would require your slideshow to be encoded into any kind of motion video format. It apparently just works on individual still images that are displayed by the Flash application. This makes it interactive as well, so you can just switch back and forth between images. So, you'd probably just have to forward your photos as image files (e.g. JPG) to them and their webmaster who takes care of the technical implementation of their site would do the rest, e.g. scaling the images to the right size, uploading them to their server and integrating them into the slide show player. They should be able to tell you what they need, though. It shouldn't be up to you to guess it.

Well, as far as your own site is concerned, I guess you'd really need to have a better idea first as to how you're going about the technical implementation. Maybe, if you like their solution, you could ask the webmaster what he's using. There are free Flash applications out there which you can integrate without actually having to program them yourself. You'd still need at least some basic HTML knowledge to put together the site's framework and embed the Flash application into it. Check this out as one possible solution:

http://flowplayer.org/

These would typically work with FLV (Flash video) as source format, which you can create in PhotoStory via the option to upload to the Magix Online Album and download the transcoded FLV file again.

I hope this helps.