Add a video to your website

There are essentially 2 ways to add a video to your Spiral website

1. Upload your video to a video service website like YouTube or Vimeo.
2. Hosting on your website. Send us the video file and we will add it to your site. 

Using YouTube

With your video recorded and edited it's a simple process to upload it to YouTube, there is help on the YouTube website to explain how to do this. Once it's uploaded YouTube will provide you with a code snippet that you can include in your website and the video will look like it is part of your site. The beauty of this method is that YouTube takes care of the conversion to a suitable web format and enables it to be viewed on PC's and Mac's. Your website visitors can watch your video with no extra software and bandwidth is free for you.

Hosting on your website

To include a video on your website and have it hosted on our server you will need to send us the video as the file will be too big to upload through the asset manager. 

Until now there has not been a standard for showing video or movies on a web page. Most videos were shown through a plug-in (like Flash) but different browsers may have had different plug-ins. To watch the video you needed to have the plug-in or to download it to your computer. Using HTML5 we are now able to embed a video in a webpage. Currently there are 3 supported video formats for the HTML5 video element. They are MP4, WebM and Ogg. Older browsers dont support HTML5. This table shows current browser support for the 3 video formats.

The real issue is the HTML5 video element is not supported by Internet Explorer 8 or earlier. 

Remember in New Zealand all our hosting providers charge for overseas traffic. If your video is popular overseas and watched by many then you will rack-up overseas traffic and may be charged extra for it.

Summary

For us in New Zealand YouTube provides a quick, simple, professional and low-cost way to include video on our websites. This is our recommended method.