Publishing audio and video online


Playing online video or audio can be difficult if it has been published in an old format, or requires a media player or browser plugin that the user does not have. The following process should help ensure that your media reaches the widest possible audience without any such difficulties.

Before you upload your audio or video, make sure that you’ve had a look at our tips for video production, advice on audio recordings of events, and are aware of copyright and other legal issues.

Media players like this can be embedded within any website.

Step 1 - Prepare your media

Your audio or video file will need to be in a format that is suitable for online playback. For streaming, this can be: Flash video, H.264/HE-AAC encoded content stored in an MPEG-4 file, or MP3 audio. We're currently working on a full guide to media formats.

Step 2 - Upload your media

There are two options available to you for publishing your media on the University web server and the right one for you depends on what you are publishing. Contact the Web Office if you are unsure which best suits your needs.

Using the streaming service

What is streaming?

The streaming service works like the BBC iPlayer – it chooses the quality of playback based on how fast a viewer’s internet connection is, so the video can start to play almost instantly. Viewers can also instantly fast-forward to points in the video without having to download the whole file, which could take hours otherwise.

Suitable when:

  1. You intend the media to be made publicly available, with no access restrictions.
  2. The recording you want to publish is longer than a couple of minutes, even up to hours long.

How to use

Upload your video to a streaming dropbox. See using the streaming service for help and signup.

Hosting in your web account

Suitable when:

  1. The media you want to publish is short (under 2 MB), and
  2. You want to allow people to download media for offline use (eg on an iPod), or
  3. You need to restrict access to your media so that only permitted visitors can see it

How to

Upload your video to your web account filestore, in the same way as any other file.

Can I put my video on YouTube?

Yes, putting your video on sites such as YouTube can be a good way of increasing the potential audience for your video, especially if it’s likely to have a wide appeal. Contact the Web Office for help with this.

Step 3 – Publish your media player

We provide a standard player that provides accessible controls and customisable features such as captions and the ability for your video to be embeddable on other websites. If you are using the Web CMS, see the instructions for adding streaming media to CMS pages Otherwise, use the media player wizard to create a player that you can embed within your website.