To let users upload videos to your website, you first need to install a video server and then configure it accordingly. There are several open-source and commercial solutions available that you can choose from.

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Installing a video server is out of the scope of this article, so if you don’t already have one installed, I recommend finding a tutorial that describes how to install it on your operating system. The following instructions assume that you have a working video server and use Apache as web server software.

To configure the video server correctly, you need to add some additional directives to the server configuration file.

Video files can be specified in a variety of formats, but since you want to send the resulting video to the user via HTTP, using H.264 or MPEG4 is recommended because these are both standards for compressed video streams that require little bandwidth and work on most devices. So, configure your server to use one of these encodings by adding the following directives and placing them before any other (otherwise, they will not have an effect).

In addition to this, you need to enable the browsing of files with the .mp4 extension. In order for this to work, you also need to allow file extensions that match the common encoding standard. You can do that by adding the following two lines to your server configuration file:

We can conclude that the server will now accept and properly deliver files that end with “.mp4” and can be retrieved via the URL’s “/”. When a user browses your website, they will see an option to upload a video. The browser already knows how to capture media from the screen or camera, so it is only natural that users want to use their browsers directly to upload video files. We provide the option to select a video file, but when users click “Upload”, they won’t see any progress or indication of what is happening.