Page 27 - print
P. 27
Video platform: a customizable, rich media solution | 26
4.3.3 Results
These findings made it very clear to me that indeed if you ask “Is downloading or streaming the videos the best way for a
video platform?” I can answer you with, streaming is better. For a video platform downloading is a bit too much, and
unnecessary. Streaming would load the videos in a quick way, and allowing users to quickly skip through the video.
Downloading would mean you have to wait for the whole video to be downloaded before, going through the video.
Hosting wise however there are different benefits to using either cloud or normal hosting. By using cloud, you will never
have to be afraid of losing your video files. Depending on where you get the cloud hosting, it could also stream the videos
nice and quickly. However, cloud hosting is still a more recent development, and quite expensive at the moment. If you
want to host your own version of a video platform, it would be a bit too much using cloud. Normal hosting however is
tremendously big; for very cheap you could get very powerful hosting. With this video platform project, there is no need
for cloud. A normal hosting would suffice, and unless the client has a huge and special project, he or she will have no need
for cloud hosting.
The mobile video market is growing like crazy. Ever since the appearance of the smartphones, people are watching videos
on their mobile devices more and more. For this you need a good way of resizing the videos for your device. With
Bootstrap this has been made quite easy. Not to forget, the video player itself should support resizing. Bootstrap will not
work easily if the video player that is being used refuses to resize. Having a good video player, and resizing it with
bootstrap will make sure that the videos will be able to play on all of the mobile devices (including tablets).
4.3.4 Problems
I ran into a few problems working on the prototype. One of the big problems was my bad estimation of when the
prototype would be finished. If you take a look at my phases table in the project plan, which can be found in appendix B,
you will see the date I have put the completion of the first prototype. It’s always hard to estimate when some project will
finish. During a projects’ lifecycle there are always problems that appear. Working on the prototype I came across different
errors, parts I had coded would not work. This needed debugging, and testing. All the while, time would still go on. Having
to fix quite some errors and tweaking other parts, I lost quite some time. The only thing I could do was to keep on going,
keep on debugging and testing. I did get back on track again from time to time, especially when programming some parts
went easily and worked at the first attempt.
The FFMPEG tool documentation was too advanced and had no structure. This was another obstacle I faced when I had to
work with the tool. The FFMPEG tool was a command line tool and it had too many different components. I decided to
leave the documentation, and just to start working on a small command line, and extend it bit by bit. Testing it all the while
I was extending it. This was the best way of getting through the documentation of FFMPEG. There was absolutely no need
for me to read the whole documentation especially when I only needed the tool to perform some smaller functions. This
solved my problem with the FFMPEG documentation; I had made the start and I only needed to keep on using the
workshop and lab strategies, so that bit by bit I would get the full command lines that I needed.