How Video Works
One thing i'd love to see added here is a blurb about the importance of the location of the video metadata in the file. Specifically that you need to have the metadata at the start of the file rather than the end of the file (which is the default) for low-latency playback on web.Explained: Freshly recorded MPEG (and almost all other container types) typically saves the header at the end of the file. This is the logical place to store header information after recording as you just append to the end of the file you've just written. It's the default.Unfortunately having the header at the end of the file is terrible for web playback. A user must download the entire video before playback starts. You absolutely need to re-encode the video with FAST-Start set.The header location is the number one mistake that i've seen a lot of website and developers make. If you find your website videos have a spinner that's seconds long before the video playback starts check the encoding. Specifically check that you've set fast start.I've seen companies who have a perfectly reasonable static site behind a CDN spend a fortune hosting their videos with a third party to fix the latency issues they were seeing. The expensive third party was ultimately fixing the issue because they re-encoded the videos with fast start set. The reality is their existing solution backed by a CDN would also have worked if they encoded the videos correctly.