If somebody wanted to start site like wimp.com or dump.com, or something similar - what would be the best way to handle such a large amount of hard drive space used by the movies? Your typical 720P movie could get into gigs and gigs of size. If it best to just get a huge hosting account and upload them all yourself, and then play them through your website? Or host elsewhere? Thanks in advance for help
I just google "creating a video hosting website: or "create a website like youtube". From what I gather you first need to find a converter that will compress and convert files to Flas(flv.) After that you need a flash player installed on your website. I think those two are going to be your biggest hurdles. vShare Video Sharing is an option that makes a clone of youtube. How To Make A YouTube Aggregator/Clone/Sharing Website on youtube by mobilephone2003 is a good tut. Also psuedotube and click-bucket are very good options
I like clipbucket, however I think your host needs to have ffmpeg enabled and not many hosts do that. I used to have Arvixe (they have ffmpeg) but my site was always down from their outages and once they deleted all of my files...better to look for someone else.