How to share a streaming video on your own website for free

Would you like to share a video with friends and family, but not share it with the world?  I’ll tell you how to do just that in this post.

This article is written assuming that you already have a site hosted by one of the many hosting services out there, like 1and1, go daddy, host monster, etc.  These hosting services usually give you many GB of storage space, but don’t usually make it easy to share your videos via a streaming server.

There are services out there that let you stream your videos without making them public, but you usually have to pay for these services.  For instance, MotionBox charges $24.99/month(!) for a Pro account, and the free account has too many limitations to be useful.

The best option for streaming video from any regular web server is probably FLV video.  This is the same format that the ‘big boys’ like YouTube use.  You can plunk down $620 for Adobe Flash CS4 so you can create a streaming video, or you can cobble one together using a couple of free tools.

If you have your video in one of several standard formats (avi, mp4, wmv, qt, etc.), you can use Free FLV Converter to convert your video to the FLV format.  This tool not only converts your video to FLV, but it produces accompanying SWF files and an html file you can put directly on your website.

The Free FLV Converter will create a video file with a name like VIDxxxxxx.flv (the xxxxxx is a date and timestamp).  It will also create FLVPlayer.swf and Skin.swf which are required for the client browser to play the video.  Also created is a VIDxxxxxxx.html file. This is a standard html file with all the code necessary to play the video.  You can just place all these files on your web server and create a link to that VIDxxxxxx.html file on another page.

If you are like me, though, you usually wind up forgetting your good video camera when going out and have to shoot video on your phone.  If this is the case, you probably have the video in 3GP format.  Unfortunately, Free FLV Converter does not convert from 3GP to FLV.  To convert a video from 3GP to one of the formats supported by Free FLV Converter, you can use the Free 3GP Video Converter to get the video into a more desirable format first.