Stream Your Original Videos
An integral part of Bits on the Run is the transcoding of your videos to a format that plays on all browsers and devices. However, in certain cases users might want to bypass our transcoding and directly download or stream the videos they upload. Think about videos that need to get published or distributed instantly, or videos whose original is of too poor quality to be transcoded.
Limitations
If you only want to offer downloads of your original videos, any video format that we can parse (i.e. just about everything) is supported.
If you want to stream your originals in BOTR players, your videos need to be encoded in MP4 format with H264 video and AAC audio. Additionally, the following limitations apply:
- Adaptive streaming does not work. Instead, the video is served as progressive download.
- Stream encryption does not work. Savvy users will be able to sniff and download your video.
- Your video may not work on devices the BOTR transcodes do (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, etc).
Passthroughs
Bypassing our transcoder can be done by building a Passthrough transcode of your video. Go to the Transcodes tab of your video and click on the green + sign of the Passthrough entry. Your passthrough will be built (i.e. copied to the CDN) and you can publish it after a few seconds:
Click the yellow Publish button to get the download URL to the Passthrough video. See below section on how to stream the Passthrough in a player.
Note: If you always want to have a Passthrough of your videos, you can set our system to build it by default. Therefore, go to Account » Templates » Passthrough and set the template to Automatically apply to all new files.
Players
To stream your Passthrough videos in a player, you should setup the player to use the Passthrough transcode of your videos. Go to the Playback tab of your player and select the Progressive download with Passthrough template option:
Next, you can simply publish your videos with this player, from the videos overview or details pages.
Note: If your video is over 1000 pixels wide, our system will automatically display an HD toggle in the player. This to prevent users with slower connections (or mobile devices) from not being able to see the video. Here is an example player that has a Passthrough video that's 1280 pixels wide:
This HD toggle is a nice feature for users that do not have the bandwidth to playback your original videos, or if they are using devices that do not support Flash. By clicking the toggle, they can choose the lower-quality video so there's no wait.
The opposite is also true. With the HD toggle, users on a slow connection can enable HD if they choose to wait for the high-quality video to buffer. This is not possible with Adaptive Streaming, since its video quality caps out at the maximum a user's bandwidth can sustain.