Transcription
What’s going on, everyone? It’s Dave here from Profitable Tools, and today I’ve got a viewer question. It’s all about video on your website. Let’s get into it. Philippe writes hi, I have a website on WordPress.
I installed a plug in to start offering courses on it. People will only have access to the class if they log in. Will Presto player improve the performance of videos that run through the course login? Or is Presto Player only going to improve the videos that I embed on my site and don’t require people to log in? Thanks.
I love this question, and I think it’s an area a lot of people get confused about. So let’s just address the best way to put video on your website. Let’s think about it this way. You need two things. You need a video file as well as a video player.
Now, if you’re like me, you remember the old days where we had MP3 s for listening to music. You might have got them illicitly off of file sharing services. You take those files and then you needed to play them back through a tool like Win Amp or itunes. Now, if you didn’t have both of those components, you could have the player, but no files. You get no music.
You could have the file, but no player. You couldn’t listen to it. Well, video on the web is very much the same. You need to have both a file of the video delivered to your customer as well as the customer has to have a video player available to them in order to view your content. Now, typically, someone will visit your website and see a video thumbnail and then click the Play button when they want the video to start.
That Play button is part of the video player software. They didn’t download anything. They didn’t have to install anything. It’s just available to them. Based on the technology that your website is providing, the video file is typically getting loaded into the video player from a totally different server than the one your website uses.
That’s because displaying websites require a lot of different specialties, and video files really don’t fit into that category. They’re just different tools for different things. The server that displays a video file is called a CDN or Content delivery network. There are many great CDNS out there which can deliver video files, but this specific comment was left on a video review of the Bunny Net video, which is a CDN service that also provides a video player at no extra cost. It was one of the reasons I was so excited to find out about that product.
Now, Presto Player is a WordPress plugin, but it’s also a fancier video player with a lot more bells and whistles than the player that Bunny Net gives you for free with your CDN. They both do the most important feature, which is playback the video to your end user. But if you want more marketing features, that’s where Bunny might become useful. So to get started with video on your website, the best thing to do is to look for a CDN or video host like Bunny or Vimeo. Most video hosts are also going to include a basic player.
That’s probably enough to get the job done. However, if you want more features, you can look at upgrading your video player to something like the FV Player or Presto Player. I’ll put links to all of my favorites in the description. Regarding the other question, the performance of the video is not generally impacted by the player itself. You might see mentions of lazy loading on certain marketing materials for video players.
What this is going to do is actually delay the video from loading until someone clicks the Play button. This will end up speeding up your overall website, but it doesn’t actually improve the performance of the video playback. For end users, performance will primarily depend on the server that’s actually hosting the video files. That CDN I talked about, the device you’re trying to play the video back on will also impact the performance both the bandwidth that it’s receiving. If it has a slow internet connection, it’s more likely to buffer.
But if it’s also an older device, it might struggle to play back something like a 4K video. Although most phones, iPads, and computers these days don’t really struggle with playing back video unless they’re ultralow budget protecting files for logged in users is typically something that is part of your learning management system, your online course system, or your membership plugin. They will protect the files, not the video player itself. So you should have no problem using Presto Player or Bunny net on any protected pages. It really won’t know the difference.
Now, I have recommendations for my favorite LMS and Membership plugins in the description, so go ahead and check those out if you’re looking for a solution like that. Now, if you have a tech question that you want me to answer, leave a comment down below and maybe I’ll turn it into a video just like this one. Make sure you subscribe to the free weekly newsletter and consider joining the community over on Facebook. Links for both of those are in the description. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one.
