Fullscreen video background - speed

[Peter Knight]

Hi guys

I'm building a homepage with a full screen, responsive video background.

The client wants the video file to be hosted on their own server and I wondered if instead it should be hosted on YouTube instead.

I'm thinking that YouTube will have much better bandwidth detection etc and handle the playback more intelligently than simply throwing an MP4 on a server.

If anyone has any experience with both scenarios, can they confirm or deny?

Thanks

P

 

[BitPoet]

29 minutes ago, Peter Knight said:

The client wants the video file to be hosted on their own server and I wondered if instead it should be hosted on YouTube instead.

I wouldn't do that for a background video. It might get blocked in other countries for no reason at all (like the silence in the movie sounding exactly like the silence in a popular movie which Disney has copyrighted) without you/your client noticing. I'd either host it myself (in this case the server or a script should support partial transfers) or use a CDN.

[louisstephens]

I do agree with BitPoet on this one. However, in the past, I have had success with using vimeo to host videos for backgrounds. 

<iframe src="video_url_here?autoplay=1&background=1" width="640" height="178" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>

It made it easy as well with adding "background=1".

[elabx]

In my experience YouTube always feels a bit clunky in comparison to hml5 video with feels more instantaneos, but could be made to work (I've only got it to be responsive with some js though),

I agree the most "slick" solution is to use native html5 video and a CDN. I have personally used AmazonS3/Cloudfront for this. 

[pwired]

Those video backgrounds are usually only there to spice up a home page or similar and are not big in size.

Have a look at the video background of this website:
https://isl.co/

That video background is only 5,3 Mb so it is easy to host on the same server as where your website is.

I would not go for an iframe as it is often exploited by spammers.
Use the html5 <video> tag instead. Use a webm version as well to be compatible with firefox browsers.