I want to install a simple script, ideally a free one, that let's me just upload video files (mpeg, mov, whatever it needs to be) and it will convert them to streaming video in a youtube-like player. ideally it will create a unique URL just like youtube or those. if it also offers an "embed" code so people could embed the whole player into their sites, and still run the videos i'm hosting on my server, that would be cool too. what can anyone recommend?
Check here video sharing scripts reviews of some of the scripts it may interest you... Anyway, what you ask is not that simple...it's not just a simple upload. You need to have some software modules installed on the server in order to convert the movies from MOV, AVI, MPEG, etc to FLV flash format (which is used on Youtube and other well known video sites). And of course you have to have the flash player... PHPmotion is a free alternative ...but, as you read in those reviews, there are more alternatives...many of them paid. Another thing to consider is that you need powerful machines to handle video conversion and serving, lots of bandwidth and lots of storage space! For a very small sites with hundreds of videos a single powerful machine would be enough probably...but if you plan to have the sites bigger than that then you will need more than one machine (a web server - could have load balancing, a database server - could have load balancing too, a video server and so on...). Online video is not cheap...