A requirement was made to provide secure access to a collection of approximately 500 videos, roughly an hour each in length. The system should be web based, use the credentials of an existing client portal and be conservative on disk/bandwidth usage. Administrators should also be able to group videos and add/remove them.
My solution was first to re-encode all the WMV format videos to something more web-friendly. This should enable smooth playback with minimal buffering whist making best use of available disk space and bandwidth allowance. For these reasons, the MKV format was chosen and the Handbrake application used for re-encoding.
The web front-end was written in PHP/jQuery and plugged in to the existing client portal to provide an easy to use interface for both users and administrators. To provide in-browser video playing support I chose JWPLayer. The system was very well received by both management and users of the site.
