Does AbleCommerce Gold support video playing or streaming

[skinsfan99]

Hi Katie,

Does AC Gold support video playing and/or streaming? We have added some YouTube links and they work fine from an <iframe>

I am wondering if we need a specific plug-in.

I did a search on the Merchant Guide for video and got back no hits.

Any information you have on this subject would be helpful.

Thanks,
David

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hi David,

Any of the html fields in AbleCommerce would support the youtube links just fine. There isn't any special requirements or anything.

[skinsfan99]

Yes we have had success with that.

Our question is can we play videos other than YouTube via AC? Example, video files that are on our server.

I would think we would need some sort of plugin and I was asking does AC support that and if so which one(s).

Thanks,
David

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hi David,

Add the extension of the videos so they can be uploaded via the asset manager. Then you can simply reference them in the html field as well. No plug ins are required. Though there are jquery add-on's that may be helpful.

http://help.ablecommerce.com/mergedProj ... ttings.htm

This is just a random jquery plug in I found using google.

http://jquery.malsup.com/media/

[AbleMods]

Our question is can we play videos other than YouTube via AC? Example, video files that are on our server.

You can, but you don't want to unless the server itself has been configured for streaming video. If you just embed the movie file without any sort of streaming feature on the server, every browser hit will require downloading the entire movie file before the page can finish loading. Anything but the smallest of video clips would drag your page speed down dramatically. This is why streaming video is so popular, it delivers video content in manageable chunks instead of all at once.

The best solution (without a lot of technical changes) is to upload your videos to YouTube or Vimeo and embed them into your site. You can tell YouTube to not show ads, trigger them to auto-play etc all within the parameters of the embedded link.

There's really very little reason to stream your own video these days unless it's monotized, in which case you would still want to use some sort of streaming service to offload the hard setup work.