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It's almost the problem as with eBay. When people search for Purdue Rugby, I want for them to be able to find our videos. People search for Videos on YouTube.

I currently have most of the videos in 'high quality' on our website with JW FLV player. More locations = more eyes.

Plus as with most things, if someone can't get something working on my site. They think it's my fault. If someone can't get something working on YouTube(Google, EBay, Facebook, etc) they think it's their fault.

My friend uses Linux on an old Dell Inspiron. BBC confusingly call both their Adobe Flash and peer-to-peer systems iPlayer. I was referring to their website, which is called BBC iPlayer, not their P2P streaming service, called BBC iPlayer. (which you clearly recommend, and is quite good).

Sorry I didn't explain that well in the original post, but since I mentioned streaming from their website and not P2P, I would've thought it was bleeding obvious.

He can't download the full resolution using the software - call my friend difficult if you like, but Windows XP won't run nicely on his laptop, Gentoo works great, and Youtube and others stream fine with it. I've set up a couple of video streams from my own server that work great for him, using JWPlayer, which stream live for him (depending on the FLV quality I choose, naturally!)

The problem comes where the BBC iPlayer Adobe Flash Player (BiAFP?) will only stream the next few minutes of the streamed file when paused, rather than Youtube which will keep streaming until the end of the file.

Apart from the obvious conservation of bandwidth, is there any technicial reason that the BBC's iPlayer (BiAFP, not their P2P software) won't stream an entire file when paused? It'd actually make it usable on slow systems.

For the record, I think the 'low quality' is actually rather good, its good enough quality to watch for most TV shows, just a shame their player isn't quite so well designed for slower connections.

Most of the videos from the BBC iPlayer (BiAFP) are already on Youtube, split into parts. I have to admit, he usually uses these. Even worse quality, yet there doesn't appear to be any other option.

Thanks for trying though. Yours would be a great solution if it were possible! Any other ideas?

For streaming on site:

1.
Convert your movie to MP4 with AAC sound and use some free, open source flash video player like http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player for streaming.

2.
Use Vimeo. Very good quality.

3.

Offer Youtube clip and Vimeo and downloads on the same page.

Regarding bandwidth:

1. Offer the movie in 3-4 sizes
2. Use a torrent tracker (either on the server or something like PirateBay), it helps.

If you don't want to use bittorrent and he expects lots of simultaneous downloads, buy a dedicated server with a lot of bandwidth.

For example, FDCServers.net offers some servers with up to 15 TB (avg 50mbps) of download pretty much guaranteed, at about 150-170$.

Keep in mind though, if he wants quality bandwidth (not really needed in this case), 100 mbps link (33TB) usually goes for about 500$ a month.

then you can go with an open source flash player that can play an FLV video. JW Player is one that comes to mind, but I know there are other better ones that support h264 and even seeking (albeit in a hackish kind of way).

Use x264 to encode a high quality mp4 of your video, and then use JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER to embed it on your site using flash. You can make it as high quality as you want.

Flash supports Timed Text subtitles. SRT support is easy to implement, some players have it (wijering). As for other containers (mkv, avi) - if the codecs are supported you can just remux them to mp4. Frankly I don't see much of a reason for mkv anymore, now that we have mp4. Not to speak of that horrible ogm.

"This isn't a cable/DSL issue. This is a "we don't tell you how much but we cut you off anyhow" issue."

I guess I'm alone when I say I think the ISP's are right as long as they warn users. In the article they called the lady in December telling her she was using too much. They didn't shut her off until February.

Now I've been known to use a lot of bandwidth and I'm sure I've used 100-200 gigs some months and I've never received a call. The article suggests the "limit" is closer to 250-500 gigabytes. If you're downloading that much you're likely:
A) doing something illegal
B) sharing your wireless router with everyone in the apartment/dorm building

Either one would warrant shutting off your account. I can't imagine downloading 500 gigs every month continuously on my own PC, I'd need a new hard drive every month, but you get a dozen people together each with 300+ gig drives (3.6 terabytes) each downloading a dozen movies a month: 5 gig movie X 12 = 60 gigs x 12 people = 720 gigs and all you're paying is $30-$40 for basic cable internet and I could see why the ISP would be upset.

And don't give me this crap that it's VOIP or youtube videos like the article suggests. VOIP for a single line uses very little bandwidth, and Youtube uses FLV Video Compression which is somewhere around 2 megabytes per minute. With only 43,200 minutes in a month, or 90,000 megabytes = 90 gigs, so even if you continuously watched Youtube video for an entire month you wouldn't approach the limit. Even if my math is wrong and it's 3 megs/minute that still only 120 gigs, well below the threshold.

If you are happy to host the video yourself, create the FLV with FFmpeg, there's a tutorial on it here: FLV encoding with ffmpeg.

..and use Jeroen Wijering's Flash Video Player for playback.

To start a you tube you will need:
FFMPEG http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/: for video conversion
FlowPlayer http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/howto.html: displaying flash video
or Flash Video Player http://jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Player
FFMPEG-PHP http://ffmpeg-php.sourceforge.net/: If php is used a nice extension for getting screen shots of videos, not necessary though
flvtool2 http://rubyforge.org/projects/flvtool2/: so you can seek though the created flash file
Then all you need is leverage framework or cms in php, or phython, or something and you are done. (well sort of!)

YouTube uses a particular Flash Video Player script which is out there free (Creative Commons) for non-commercial use, and licensable for commercial use. With that, some content management software (done from scratch if you're brave, otherwise just tweak the crap out of one of the zillion CMS packages out there), and an obscene amount of bandwidth, you can have your own YouTube clone up and running in no time.