Deer bedding down.
My Bushnell Trail camera produces video in AVI format which neither Quicktime nor Windows Media Player on my Win XP machine can read. STOP RIGHT THERE. If I were to do it over, I would not use this camera for exactly the above reason. However, it was a gift and I’m going to use it.
Just to see the videos I need another player. VLC from VideoLan is about the only one that works, is free, and is not loaded with malware.
After trying many different add-ons to WordPress and finding none acceptable, I went with Youtube as the web hosting environment, and insert the embed code into the blog (must edit in ‘Text’ mode), using the Youtube option to suppress ‘suggested’ videos.
The AVI format created by the camera can be uploaded to Youtube as-is. However, if I want to edit in any fashion, cut, merge, etc I have to get the video into a format that Windows can read. This means getting a video converter, and finding one that worked on my Win XP machine was almost impossible. There are many advertised, most are junk – see this link. I didn’t learn about the situation until I had purchased a license and found the website PavTube infected with malware, and ‘support’ non-existent.
I ended up with two converters : VLC and Handbrake. I want to make the videos playable in Windows and Quicktime (Apple). Neither of the converters works for both. Quicktime needs a specific version of MP4. While VLC can output an MP4 ‘container’, it is not playable by Quicktime. Handbrake can only output 2 formats, but MP4, playable by Quicktime, is one of them. I use VLC to create ASF output using the DIV3 video and MP3 audio which can be read by Windows Media Player and Windows Movie Maker.
Movie Maker, the XP version I have, is very quirky. I can combine the ASF clips created by VLC and create a movie from them predictably, but if I want to do any editing I have to first make a movie from the ASF clips which converts everthing into WMV format, and then I can edit in Movie Maker without it freezing up.
Several of my first attempts dead-ended.
There are many suggestions about adding ‘codecs’ (code/decode tables) so players like Quicktime could read files they weren’t designed to read. This didn’t work and introduced a whole new realm of possibilities like disabling my base players altogether.
I assumed that WordPress incorporated some robust video player, and started testing different plugins. This was a waste of time. None of the twenty or so players I tried performed consistently or as advertised. I then gave the base WordPress player mediaelement.js a try. It also failed to behave predictably. Videos don’t play at all in IE8, but loop in preload. The preload parameter is ignored in Firefox. Two videos in the same blog behaved differently even with the same setup parameters.
Different browsers use different video standards, as different operating systems do likewise. Video for Apple is different from video for Window 8 is different from video for your iPhone. Properly hosting video on the web means storing it in multiple formats, and a widely used player like Youtube takes all that into consideration and provides it for you transparently. If you use a self-hosting approach, you will end up being the one to do the multiple encodings and formatting, and it gets quickly more involved than expected.