“What is the easiest way to put music clips and video on a website?”
November 7th, 2007Thankfully, answering this reader question is a LOT easier than it would have been several years ago. Let’s start with audio, (music).
Music
If you’re a musician, and you have your own music that you want people to be able to play on your website, there’s a couple of things you can do.
- Start your own band page on MySpace. MySpace allows you to upload 3 songs to your profile that they will host for free. Unfortunately, people have to go to your myspace page to listen.
- Put the mp3s on your own server, and user one of the freely available flash mp3 players like the JW MP3 Player to play the music on your site. (very technical and easy to screw up).
Option 1 is very easy and not at all flexible, but more and more bands are doing it. There’s a lot of other services out there like MySpace that allow you to do the same thing, but more people know about MySpace and will discover your music there.
Video
Video is a lot easier. Thanks to the success of YouTube, video hosting sites are popping up all over the internet. YouTube is still the most popular, so a good start is to have an account there. However, if you’re not concerned with people finding your videos on YouTube and only plan to show them on your own website, Google Video is a better choice because there’s less "junk" on Google Video than on YouTube. You can get to Google Video by visiting http://www.google.com/video and look for the "Sign in" link. If you have an account with any of the other Google services, this account will work there as well.
Once you’ve uploaded your video, it will take some time for it to be processed. After it’s ready to watch, just visit the page where the video is shown, and look for something that says "Embed Video". This is a common feature to most video hosting sites now. They generate a little snippet of text that you can put into your web page that will cause the video to show up there. That way people can watch the video right on your site but you don’t have to figure out a way to put the video on the server, and write the code to make it show up on your page.
