Video player advice (please!)

Developers Stream
1

Hoping someone can help out a business guy struggling with video player complexity. The background: I have a website that plays a short video as a landing page. I then also have a password protected marketing video that I want to email a link to potential customers, provide them a pw and they view the short marketing video in full, or nearly-full screen.

My website is not www, but https:// I have a free Cloudflare account and it is linked to my website. The website seems to show well across platforms. I just learned that because my site is not www. Cloudflare is not active. So I assume my site is spinning off only my hosting company’s servers (SiteGround).

I have two player-types of the marketing video (this is separate from the website’s home page that displays a different video).

My web developer said “I know how to do that, no problem.” This first player he developed has the video saved on the website hosting company’s server (SiteGround). It shows well, but not consistently across platforms and does not show well from some far-off locations. Given inconsistencies and a seeming lack of robustness, I then engaged him to develop an embedded version. The underlying video of this second version is at Vimeo.

So, one version stores the video at SiteGround. The second version embeds a video stored/hosted by Vimeo.

My goal is to enable the 120-second video to display robustly and without interruption.

I’m told if I change my website to www, then Cloudflare would cache it. But I’ve also been told because it is a video, Cloudflare won’t actually help since they exclude videos to promote their Stream Service.

I know Cloudflare’s Steam product could be a solution, but I’d rather not pay another provider given my small budget unless I need to.

After lots of struggle, I think I figured out:
My website is spinning off SiteGround’s servers.
My marketing video that has the underlying video stored in SiteGround is spinning off SiteGround’s servers.
My marketing video that has the underlying video embedded from Vimeo is spinning off Vimeo’s servers and there are more of those so it should play more robustly this way.
I cannot leverage Cloudflare’s free service to improve things since it will not cache video.
So there would be no benefit to my changing my website from https:// to www.
If I hired someone to set up Cloudlflare’s Steam service it should play the most robustly of all options.

Whew, do I have all or any of that right?

Thank you if you can help share any advice or corrections!

2

That is 100% not true.

Yes but actually no.
It depends. You could put all Videos in a particular folder like:

https://domain.tld/videos/

And then set a PageRule

https://domain.tld/videos/* → Cache Everything

With this rule ALL Files will be cached (AFAIK also videos) but you should not exeed the limitations: 512MB (LINK)

If you not exeed this limitations you could force Cloudflare to cache your video and “stream” it from Cloudflare Cache. But be aware that Cloudflare is not working like “real CDN” but more like reverseProxy. This means it does delete the video from Cache when it needs to and it will just start Caching as soon as requested and just on POP (cf-ray) base. But it will be the best “for free” option.
Also you could just use YouTube. But for now I would go with the “Cache Everything” option if your Video is not bigger then 512MB

Yes and no. If you use a “blank” domain like “https://domain.tld” you are not using a FQDN (Full Qualified Domaion Name) but these days this does not matter at all anymore!! Really NOT.
But it does have some advantages when it comes to “Cookies” as Cookies set on a SubDomain are handeled different like Cookies set on a Main-Domain as they can be “accessed” by a SubDomain, but the ones set on a SubDomain can not be accessed by any other other SubDomain or Domain.

But this does not help you here at all! It does NOT rank better or worse NOR does it help you in any way at Videos! Thats why Chrome/FireFox also hides the “www” from Domains as its a common way to set the Main-Domain to the www (standard SubDomain) to have a FQDN.