By Greenhill on

Hello!

I know the basics of Drupal, how to set up a site, produce content and know about a bunch of different modules and know how to use them. However, I don't have enough experience to know the best practices and don't really know an expert who could help me with my problem.

I want to set up a simple site where the visitors can watch a video (one short film although there might be more in the future). This would be a simple task to do, but I would want to know how professionals would build the site. If there are good tutorials about it, let us know but hopefully we get some good discussion here.

Template: I think a two column page would be fine which I try to skin. Would a professional choose some certain good quality templates or does it really matter? ;-)

Video module: if the file is big, are there components that support good streaming capabilities like Microsoft Smooth Streaming in Silverlight? http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/smoothstreaming/ I want to be able to create a site which is not going to make the Internet surfer to wait forever and skip to any part of the video.

High quality vs. low quality: If you want low and high quality videos and to enable user to choose the quality, how would you implement it? Would it be a property of the player or property of the page? The original video will be in 800 × 480 pixel resolution.

Hosted video vs. Youtube: What things should I consider if the video will be on our server? What things should I consider if the video will be linked from Youtube? Would it be better to have the low quality video on Youtube and the high quality video on our server?

Voting: No voting here, but maybe comments. However, if the video is on Youtube, is it possible to get that Youtube rating/number of views/votes on our site? Have you done that?

Forum: I have used Advanced Forum, but would like a simple lightweight system. Which one would you recommend and would you set up some auto-moderation modules with it?

Site structure example below:

_______________________________
-HOME-About-Video-Contact-Forum
_______________________________
                                   |
                                   | 
                 PLAYER        | SIDEBAR
                                   |
                                   |
_______________________________


_______________________________
-Home-ABOUT-Video-Contact-Forum
_______________________________
                                   |
                                   | 
             SOME TEXT          | SIDEBAR
                                   |
                                   |
_______________________________


_______________________________
-Home-About-VIDEO-Contact-Forum
_______________________________
                                   |
                                   | 
                 PLAYER        | SIDEBAR
                                   |
                                   |
_______________________________


_______________________________
-Home-About-Video-CONTACT-Forum
_______________________________
                                   |
                                   | 
          CONTACT FORM         | SIDEBAR
                                   |
                                   |
_______________________________

_______________________________
-Home-About-Video-CONTACT-Forum
_______________________________
                                   |
                                   | 
                  FORUM        | SIDEBAR
                                   |
                                   |
_______________________________