Running Videos from Online Storage

[Griffin]

At present I have a bunch of videos stored in my domain on my webhost's server. I want to move them to some free external online storage facility like eg. vimeo. to save space in my website.

I could use BT Cloud - Dropbox - Vimeo etc but one has to log in to them to play the videos.

My website has a page with thumbnails for each video. It used to be that you click a thumbnail and the video played - it was embedded html. This stopped working a long while ago as I never got round to updating the software when required. I want to amend this page so that when you click a thumbnail it opens a new browser tab and plays the video now located in external video storage. This could either be by a link to the video using video player of the external online storage system or embedded video player in my website. But I want anyone to be able to click the thumbnails and play the videos without having to log in to the cloud storage. I'm having trouble googling for what I want as it is not straightforward to explain.

An additional feature would be nice - that the only way to play the videos is via my website so they are all secure in the cloud - the thumbnail page could get hacked but it's not advertised anywhere so you'd need to find it in a sub-sub directory under my domain, so it is tucked away out of site for people who know it's there and not for people that don't know it's there.

Can anyone recommend best solution to all this?

[Aggie]

It's way beyond this Luddite... I have to upload videos to U-Toob to share them.  Can you do an embedded html based on that?

I do understand what you're asking, though, and have wondered about the same thing myself. Presuming I ever set up a website I'd like to post videos that were not dependent on the Googleverse to share with friends. I imagine that hosting them on your own rented server space and using your website bandwidth to play them would get expensive pretty quick??

[Griffin]

I imagine that hosting them on your own rented server space and using your website bandwidth to play them would get expensive pretty quick??

That's why I am asking. I've run out of space on my hosted web server space. To have more space is too expensive.

Since asking here, I have solved it. I tried out a few methods, finally settling on Youtube with the videos unlisted. No reason for anyone to know they are there as searching won't find them. Other security solutions start getting costly. However, even Youtube has space limits, but I don't think I have enough videos to add up to the available space.

I have several videos up and running on my web site now, but still more to be done.