What should the file size be for website videos?

Question

I'm working on a webiste for a client that, when finished, will have about 20 videos in the gallery section. I've already converted the videos tp mp4, ogg, and webm video types but I was wondering what is a reasonable file size for these different formats. I checked out this question "What is a reasonable file size for a 4 minute video on the web?" but I'm still not satisfied.

To convert I had .mov files. I opened them up in Windows Movie Maker, cut, mute, and took a snapshot of them. I then saved them all as .mp4s. Then I used Miro Video Converter to convert them all again to .mp4 which brought down the size a bit. I then converted the new mp4s to .ogg and webm.

Now, I ended up with final cuts like this:

1. mp4 files range from about 3MB to 30MB
2. ogg files are a little more sporadic. most of them range 10MB-30MB but then i have several that are around 70MB for some reason
3. webm files give me some concern. they came out to be about 2MB-10MB with some great quality. I almost feel like it's too good to be true...

Should I be worried about these file sizes? I did some calclations based on my internet speed which is 40Mbps. at that rate it should take about 11.6s to load a 70MB videos which is my largest video. Is this too long? I kinda feel like it is. Will the user be able to start playing the video before it loads. I'm going to be using HTML5 video tag with flash fallback by the way.

Oh, I forgot to mention. None of these videos are longer than 45 seconds. That's another thing. are the file sizes too big for how long the videos are?

Answer 1

To me the sizes you have mentioned seem ok, but you do have a lot of videos on the one page. You could inform the browser that you don't want the videos to be downloaded unless the user actually chooses to play them by using setting the preload attribute to "none" on the video tag.

If the videos are in a certain order, e.g. the most popular are at the beginning, then you could set preload="meta" on those ones, which tells that browser that you would like them to download the metadata only, so they might start to play quicker.