Seeking: Customised playlist for video promo

[Ampa]

My partner has filmed a video promo for her forthcoming theatre show.

She wants to insert a customised piece of footage personalised to each recipient such that the final presentation will play as...

General Intro >> Personalised Greeting >> Main Movie

She could of course render out 80 versions of the video, upload them individually and send urls to each recipient, but since 2 of the 3 chunks of video are fixed this seems very wasteful!

Can anyone suggest a tool / website / clever hack that would bolt the 3 bits of video together when the recipient clicks a custom URL?

[mouser]

That's an interesting question..

Can you be a little more specific about the nature of the personalized video..

Is she going to record each personalized video on demand as she needs it?  Or is she going to record them all at once?  How hard would it be to record them all ahead of time and upload them all, so that all the pieces were online?

How important is it that the final video appear absolutely completely seamless and not appear to be a sequence of 3 items?

[Ampa]

The personalised section breaks the 4th wall and talks directly to the viewer by name (also mentions their job title).

All the sections are prerecorded since she knows the recipient's info.

It is important that the sequence of videos runs as smoothly as possible... a gap of a fraction of a second might be acceptable, but anything more (waiting for the 2nd or 3rd video to buffer) would spoil the effect.

--

My host is DreamHost and I notice that they have a licensed version of JWPlayer available to all their customers. I see that this accepts playlists as input, so might be able to use this as a solution - but only if the transitions between videos are essentially seamless as described above.

[Ampa]

Did some playing with this yesterday...

Using a playlist causes an unacceptable gap between the files - JWPlayer doesn't buffer the 2nd video while playing the first.

Making complete videos for each recipient seems to be the only solution atm, BUT the files are big, 30Mb each, and with 80 to upload at a pathetic 40Kb per second it will take about 14 hours!

This is exactly what I hoped to avoid and seems so unnecessary since 95% of each file is identical!

HELP!

[JoTo]

Hi Ampa,

i have not digged deeper in this, but it seems JWPlayer 5.9+ should have this feature.

See this closed ticket on the developer bugtracker of LongTailVideos JWPlayer.

http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/ticket/1183

It may or may not help you in this problem, but maybe worth a look because the ticket is closed with "FIXED" status?

Greetings
JoTo

[Ampa]

JoTo: This seems to me to be a slightly different issue... earlier versions of the player did the following when playing a playlist with autostart enabled...

Play Video 1 > Display Preview Image of Video 2 > Play Video 2

This caused a nasty flash as the preview image was shown for a split second.

5.9+ do it correctly...

Play Video 1 > Play Video 2

But there is still a delay (though no flashed image) as Video 2 will not start to buffer before Video 1 ends.