uh, wanting, not want. And here's the link if you want to waste 5 minutes of your life.

Too big to stream? Or, too big to download?

I can download at a rate of about 4.5 - 7 Mbps (means that the 130m page should've d/l in about 2min30sec). It took about 4-1/2 min, which may be too long for you, especially for people on DSL - it could take them about 10 min to see it. I'd say make it smaller.

(Oh, I'd comment on the vid itself, but Quicktime doesn't like being on my computer, and protests by crashing whatever browser I run it in.)

I would say yes. Especially if someone didn't know how big it was. I opened that link and sat there waiting for it to load for a couple of minutes then gave up and closed it.

I opened that link and sat there waiting for it to load for a couple of minutes then gave up and closed it.

Yeah, but that's a good reason to stream it though, isn't it?

I have the same problem that Zack_Replica has (at least with recent versions of QT), I'm using the 64 bit version of XP which I think is the problem.

Yeah, but that's a good reason to stream it though, isn't it?

That link was supposed to be streaming, right? Is there a difference between streaming and embedding?

Uh, that should be streaming media and embedded media, not embedding.

I've been waiting for over 30 minutes now for the video to download and the embedded file to start playing.

Sorry, puke & cry, I wasn't meaning to be snarky. I assumed that we were being directed towards the non-streamed version. QT (and FLV) can both be embedded as streaming or non-streaming files. You need to serve the flash files to get FLV to stream (and it does it in a cool way that lets you jump around the parts that have already been downloaded) and you need to tag (? something like that) the MOV file to get QT to stream.

Chewie, if you're thinking of this as the splash page for a web site, this will be a really bad idea. Almost everyone will give up on it while waiting for it to load.

Heh, it finally loaded and crashed my browser in the process. I'm still downloading the file, so it will be interesting to see if I can play it in VLC or something.

It's called "hinting" not "tagging". And while of course any file the can be browsed has to be served, I meant FLV has to be served by an appropriately configures special flash server if you want the streaming option.

I downloaded the video and was able to watch it with VLC.

You can do what you want without using video at all. I'd suggest a simple animated GIF for the "simple, fresh, modern" then the logo. Then give the user a choice of themes for their slideshow ("modern + aesthetic", "function + form", etc). For each of those sections have a separate photo gallery with the option of clicking through or using thumbnails, but configured to play a slideshow by default. If you use something like the Mootools based javascript here, you can achieve that "Ken Burns" style "panning across stills" movie effect without video. This means no plugin (which shuts out many linux users as well as Zack_Replica and me) and the only space taken up is that of the photos you use. I can set up a demo of what I mean if that would help.

Um, most of what y'all are talking about is over my head, but yeah, if I can do it like Gecko says, that'd be a good option. Here's the info from Dreamhost. I dont' know what the difference is between streaming and embedded. All I know is I don't want it to take hundreds of years to load!

I agree that it's a terrible landing page as it is and people will bail - I haven't replaced the real index page with it for that reason.

Gecko that Mootools thing seems a little bit choppy - is there a control for that? Or did you mean to use Mootools just for the text, not the images?

I also forgot to mention there is no sound with this thing, it's just images/text.

Hmm. It is choppy, now that you mention it. (I did indeed mean for the images). There are also problems with Jpeg artifacts as the "camera" pans across. By that I mean that there are "shimmers" and a general lack of smooth flow. I've had a look around for alternatives, but they all seem to suffer the same problem, so it might well be a Jpeg thing.

I'm guessing that you used something like iMovie to create the MOV file. If this is the case, you should have a variety of options for how you save (or more likely, export) the final file. Try doing that again, but instead of saving it as a QT (MOV) file, export it as a Shockwave file (swf). This should be a lot smaller (you should also make sure that the file you are exporting isn't any bigger than it needs to be by making sure that the images you use to create it are the same size as the finished product will be). The resulting swf file will play in Dreamhost's Flash Media Player.

This is basically what you would end up with after going the FLV route, but without the bloat. I would still recommend chopping it up the way I suggested though.