VIDEO CONTENT

BODY OF THE BOOK - Part B

A WORD ABOUT VIDEO CONTENT

One item I found that would be useful for the ebook we are creating is this video from YouTube. Notice that I have placed the code inside a box (table). This make it easier to move and manipulate without losing any of the code (which I can also avoid by going into HTML viewing mode and manually copying the code there, but it takes longer).

The amount of space this video takes up if it were an AVI file is 8.62 Mb - pretty large, but by linking to the YouTube file itself, it takes up only about 5 bytes - nearly 8.6 million times smaller!

Notice also that I can move the table itself to the right or left just as if it were a piece of art - GIF, JPG.

Video files are usually in one of the following formats:

AVI - Windows Movie Player file

MOV - Apple Quicktime Movie file

MP4 - iPod Movie file

FLV - Flash Video file

The Google search resulted in only three results for the word "iridology" under VIDEO. This tells me there is a wide open opportunity for more videos on this subject on Google Video and YouTube.

If you've made your own video, you might want to upload it to Google, YouTube or any of the growing number of online video hosts - then link to your own video in your ebook. This save you enormous bandwidth (website traffic congestion) in your downloads. With any website you have limited bandwidth. If you go over the limit, your website can either drop dead or you get a huge bill for that extra bandwidth.

What, exactly, is bandwidth? you ask. Think of the Internet as a maze of super-highways filled with cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc. Your bandwdth is a measure of how wide your own website's super-highway is. If you have, say, 1Gb of bandwidth per month, this is the equivalent of a small dirt road in the country - it won't hold much traffic. If, on the other hand, you have a monthly bandwidth allotment of 500Gb, you have a 10-lane super-highway that can hold a lot of traffic. Let's say you have an ebook with a file size of 1 Mb. If 100 people a month download it, that uses up 100 Mb of bandwidth. If you have 100 ebooks of the same size and the download demand is the same, your bandwidth has just jumped to 100 x 100 or 10,000Mb (10 Gb).

Your challenge is to reduce bandwidth to keep your costs down and keep your website alive.

One way to do this is to select the right file format from the list above.

As I write this, I am downloading a 1 hour and 4 minute video which deals with iridology, among other related subjects. The AVI file is 485.3Mb. The MP4 file is 283.4Mb. The FLV file is 172.4Mb. Big difference! Just the AVI file itself would take up almost a whole CD. It is NOT something I would want to have in my download folder. The bandwidth would eat me alive!

Probably 90% of Internet users have Windows Media Player; only 10% have Macs, which uses Quicktime (although there are also many people who have both on a Windows machine. On the other hand, almost everyone has Flash installed - AND the Flash file (FLV) is much, much smaller. The only problem is it's also harder to actually insert FLV code on a web page or in an ebook.

Fortunately, I can place a simple bit of code on this page, requiring again only a few bytes of information, and provide my reader to the 485Mb video at much smaller bandwidth. Here is the code (to put in on a web page, copy and [IMPORTANT!] paste it into a plain text word processor like NotePad, then go into HTM mode on a web page and simply paste it inside a table as in the example below, but make sure the code all appears on one line or it won't work):

and here is the video:

Of course, the reader must be connected to the Internet to view it. On a dialup modem (average 28.6 Kb per second download speed) this could cause a major problem, but the latest figures I've heard say 75% of Americans now have high-speed Internet connections (DSL or cable). Even so, there might be jerkiness if too many people are watching it at the same time. For those who don't have fast connections, I can offer the whole thing on CD or even DVD - at a higher price.