How easy is it to code in-built videos?

Question

First time poster so please don't bite my head off. Basically, I'm having a site built for me and I don't really know anything about coding but I'm not too sure if I trust my web developer. I asked him recently about adding a feature where I could display built-in videos like in this page and he quoted me quite a high amount for it.

I just wanted to double check with you guys whether this is a difficult feature to add in and whether it justifies a reasonable amount of money on top of what I'm already paying him.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

As mentioned by Prasad, there is a lot of free tools over the internet that you can just copy and paste and it's done. So I would say it's pretty easy for us developers to do that...

Where it could raise the price is if you want some king of interface where you can add or delete videos yourself on your website. That's the more complicated part because the developer have to deal with file upload, security, maybe some PHP related configs, etc... But if you are just asking him to put that video there and this other one there and nothing else, I don't think he deserves a big amount of money for that !

For a more precise advice, I would suggest you to give us more infos about how he's making your website. If he is making it from scratch it would justify the price, but if he's using an existing CMS (content management system) the price could probably be lower.

Also maybe you could tell us the price he is asking (or an approximate) ? I haven't personally set a price on such things but maybe if someone else here have already done something similar he could tell you if the price is acceptable, or not ! :)

Answer 2

Alan, first know that you can do this! (you need to be a bit comfortable with HTML, that helps yes).

So first thing you need to do is get those videos done in MP4 format (and preferably also in OGV or WebM format). The tools I use for this is MiroVideoConverter (free).

The next thing is to use a video player (I like video.js) in my site. It will also tell you how to setup the video embedding script.

Thats all that there is to it. Put the video files in a folder on your server (or a CDN such as Rackspace/AWS), put the embed script in your site and boom you are done.