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Comment by svollmar | Hacker News Reader

There are two reasons I decided on zipping the video files: (1) you would want a "real" streaming server for a streaming-type of behaviour (2) I know a number of users who would find it difficult to save a video for offline-viewing, once they have it playing inside their browsers. Do you agree? I am happy to learn something new here as this is, as we mention somewhere in the text, the first time we host any video content. And by the way, my email address is given at the bottom of the page you are referring to and I only found your comment accidentally.

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Progressive video download over dumb HTTP works very well, so it's unlikely you need a special streaming server for most use cases, and particularly not in this case. Modern browsers have native video support for Ogg Theora (Chrome, Firefox, Opera) or some codec in a QuickTime container now (Safari), so if the files weren't zipped there's a good chance that progressive video download would work for most of your audience without any special effort on your part.

Your second point is valid, I hadn't considered it as a serious problem. I think a better solution than a zip file is to provide a "download" link pointing to the file that serves it with the Content-Disposition HTTP header set. This requires some control over the web server (e.g. ability to run script, or set up an htaccess file), so it's not always an option.

Edit: sorry for complaining on HN rather than contacting you directly. I was venting because it's frustrating that I couldn't watch the first few minutes of the video to decide if it's worth watching/downloading the entire video.

Not a problem. I have actually tried the un-zipped approach: it does indeed work with Safari and Firefox for the Quicktime flavours. One thing I tend to do, however, is to fast-forward the movie once to decide whether I want to view all of it - and this is definitely not possible if it is not a special streaming protocol. But it is probably a good idea to provide more than one link for a movie (we do not have that many different ones anyway), so users can decide whether they want streaming or download only. Thanks!

That sounds like it's using the QuickTime plugin in both browsers. Firefox won't play anything in a QuickTime container natively. If you're using the native browser video playback support (aka HTML 5 <video>), you should be able to seek anywhere in the video without a special server as long as the web server supports HTTP range requests, which is part of HTTP 1.1 and should work by default with most configurations.

By default my Android device doesn't know about zip files or what to do with them, so I can't watch the video until I get to a desktop. I think the zipping is a bad idea.

Thank you very much!

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