How to get started with providing sermon videos on our website

We’re finally at a point where we are making video recordings of our sermons. Our goal is to provide them on our WordPress website via the plugin SeriesEngine, which will pull from sermons uploaded to YouTube. (That’s the current plan, anyway)

However, I was blown away by the size of the video files: somewhere in the neighborhood of 600MB for a video mp3 file. I quickly realized that uploading them as is just wouldn’t be reasonable. We have a 10MB up/1MB down DSL connection (we are in a rural area).

So, what are our options? Do the videos need to be converted? Do we need to upload them as they are recording or something? How do people do this?

Thanks!

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We use WordPress for our site using these two plugins (which I’m hoping to combine into one in the near future):

We host our videos on Vimeo, you can get a few TB of storage for around $300/yr. We also use Hipcast for our podcasts - and they host both video and audio files - though they may not be the highest quality.

The latter I’m not huge on, they lack an API of any kind and I’d like to automate some things with our WordPress plugins that are simply impossible currently.

You can also use a program like Handbrake to try out different types of export using different codecs and see what gives you a reasonable file size.

Dave