Become a DNN Video Star

Posted by Jeff on Monday, November 19, 2007 to DotNetNuke, DNN Tips and Tricks

If you haven’t noticed, video has become a major part of the Internet experience. From a site visitor’s perspective, a picture is worth a thousand words. A moving picture with audio is worth even more! For SEO purposes, you of course need to make sure your site contains an appropriate amount of relevant text. Get that done if SEO is important to you. Then pay firm attention to the idea that you should always use the medium that will deliver the most insight for the least intake effort for any given topic.

For example, I’ve struggled to explain the importance of RSS to friends and family. Most websites with an RSS button dedicate a page full of text to explaining it. I know what it’s all about and those even put me to sleep! Here’s a beautiful example of making a point that will stick using video:

So, how can you include video within DNN?

There are many options and formats. You could go with Quicktime, Windows Media, or Flash, for example. I’ve tried a ton of delivery methods. My primary concern is having videos that can be seen by the biggest percentage of site visitors. Flash (.flv) is my favorite, but I reached a limit of about 90% success. When I changed to different flash players, it was always 1 step forward and 1 step back. The best solution I've found is to offer a solid FLV option and add a backup link to a Windows Media (.wmv) version of each video. That'll get you as close to 100% overall coverage as is possible!

There are a couple of DNN video modules on Snowcovered. I’m sure they are fine if you only need to put your video in a specific pane of a specific page. More than likely, however, you’re going to want to embed a video in-line within a Text/HTML or blogging module. For that reason, I suggest looking into a method that will allow you to place snippets of code in the “source” view of any rich text editor.

As long as you aren't expecting an insane amount of site traffic, you can easily purchase some cheap hosting to store your video assets. Then just point back to those files from your main website in these code snippets. The videos will be delivered as "progressive download" and will work just fine. There is no need to go spend bigtime cash on a streaming solution.

For self-hosted Flash players, I like the guys at Earth Science Agency. They have been very responsive when customizing players for me. ESA offers a standard javascript code snippet format, or you can get into some interesting XML based playlist players. Alternately, here is a popular free Flash player from Jeroen Wijering. Self-hosting is a good option if you don’t want advertising and don’t need viral distribution tools.

If you are hoping to attract traffic to your site through viral marketing, you’ll want to use an outside video service. YouTube is the big dog in this arena and still the best choice for most people. The downside is relatively poor video quality and occasional advertising overlays.

There are dozens of good services competing for Youtube’s dinner, such as Veoh, Revver, and Brightcove. Many of them offer superb video quality and other unique features. For instance, check out Viddler’s interactive commenting technology. Almost all of these services remain free for you by injecting pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, or overlay advertising messages on your videos. Many of them will even share as much as 50% of this advertising revenue with you. So, you could actually make money from inserting videos on your site! Don’t plan to buy a new car with the proceeds, though. A super-sized McDonald’s value meal might be more plausible.

I really like using these services because it's their job to make damn sure the players function properly for the widest audience possible. It also takes my attention off the code snippets. I don't really care to read or understand the code. I just want to cut and paste it into DNN. Just go to any Text/HTML module, open a rich text editor (such as FCK Editor), click the "source" or "HTML" view, and paste the code in. Voila, instant video! I usually switch back to the WYSIWYG view as quickly as possible and get on with writing my copy.

I hate Google Adsense. Sure, you can pretty it up with colors, fonts, backgrounds, and placement. But, let’s say you’ve done your job and created a beautiful, content rich, interactive website. To me, adding an Adsense sidebar is like vomiting on a van Gogh. Video ad placements can actually be far worse than text-based Adsense. Pre-roll video ads are particularly nasty. A pre-roll ad is usually an 8-12 second video clip from some company like Crest, Chevrolet, or Verizon that “rolls” immediately after your site visitor hits the “play” button. The ad plays before the content your visitor actually wanted to see. Pre-roll ads are a sure way to drive people away from your site. Show me the candy first, then show me your commercial.

I give YouTube high marks here as well. Their video overlay ads cover just the bottom quarter or so of your video while it plays. More importantly, your site visitor has the power to click “x” to banish the ad if she so chooses.

My favorite video service based on video quality and features is easily Brightcove. They get one huge blackmark in my book for the use of pre and post-roll ads, however. If Brightcove would just adopt the YouTube overlay ad style, it would be unbeatable. Brightcove offers a wildly convenient conversion/upload tool that resides on your local machine and handles all your video uploads with a fantastic batch process. You get full control to customize the look and feel of your players, and it is very easy to create slick multi-title players. I also like that Brightcove offers both Javascript and IFrame embed codes. Unlike many other tools (like Wordpress), DNN will actually allow you to use these codes! Why is that important? Because it avoids the ugly “click to activate” issue in IE.

I have been labeled “perfectionist” and a few other four letter words in my life. So take this with the appropriate grain of salt. I really dislike the little gray bounding box and “click to activate” message that appears when you hover over an html embedded video for the first time. See the video at the beginning of this post, for example. If that’s not a big deal to you, then ignore this last bit. If it in fact offends your artistic sensibilities, then I highly recommend you check out Vasilis Terzopoulos’ fix for this issue: Add Flash content to your skins, the right way.

I’ve just learned that this issue should be a thing of the past in the near future. See this article on Microsoft’s permanent fix for the problem scheduled to hit sometime in 2008. Of course, you've all probably been around software long enough to avoid premature celebration. I'm sure it will take them awhile to roll this out. Plus, it looks like you'll also need to wait for every websurfer to install an IE Cumulative Update. Hmmm ... you might want to stick with Vasilis' recommendation for now.

Adding video content to DNN based websites is very easy. Surprisingly, I don’t see it often enough. I recommend you take a hard look at your website. Look for wordy concepts that might be more exciting and straightforward in video. Scour YouTube for videos that support your textual content. Shake things up by delivering an occasional blog post of yourself speaking on film. Bring some warm humanity into your online creation and your site visitors will thank you.

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