Separating Media Files From Content Management
Monday, April 25th, 2011 at 7:00am -- Kat Liendgens
As websites are becoming more and more media-rich, the question of where to host your videos inevitably arises. This is not just a question for organizations who are using a CMS, but for everybody. If you are not using a CMS, and you have a large amount of video and audio files, you probably don’t want to burden the web server with the hosting of those files (similarly, you would not store large media files in a database, but rather, just store the path to the files). Hosting your files on a dedicated media server ensures that your web server won’t get bogged down. An alternative to an in-house media server is a subscription to one of many hosted media solutions available on the market. At Hannon Hill, for example, we use Wistia, which is a monthly subscription service.
If you are using a content management system, the same considerations apply. Since videos are typically very resource-heavy, we don’t recommend using your CMS as a media server, but instead using a dedicated server or hosted service. Storage has become fairly inexpensive, so it only makes sense to use your CMS for complex tasks, while leaving the resource-heavy files on a media server.
There are some ways in which you can use Cascade Server to push out web pages containing video content, such as
- Embedding videos in the WYSIWYG Editor - You can insert and edit embedded media right within the WYSIWYG Editor. Our latest release, 6.8, makes the process even easier. You can select the file type (Flash, Quicktime, Shockwave, etc), enter the URL of the file location, and even specify the dimensions of the video. You can also preview it in the editor window, set it to auto-play, loop it, etc.
- Embedding Media through your Data Definition fields - One of the great things about Cascade Server is that the way users update content is highly customizable. Depending on the various locations that you store your videos, you can make your Data Definition fields as specific as you need them to be. For instance, if all of your video files reside on YouTube or another hosting service, you can create a text field in which the user just needs to specify the video ID. The appropriate embed code will then be output to display the video in your website’s look-and-feel. If you have multiple video hosts, you can give your users the option to select the type of channel by selecting a radio button which will then output the appropriate embed code depending on the user selection. If the URL is not always the same (and the ID is not the only unique section of the file path), you can allow the user to simply paste the entire URL into a text field. If you want to be able to sort your videos by date, gallery, category, etc., you will need the ability to categorize and tag your video embed pages. For this purpose, you will want to use Cascade Server’s metadata fields. Of course, you can also use Cascade Server to “expire” videos at a certain date, removing it from index page listings.
How are you handling videos on your site? We’d love to hear from you.
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