Need advice on setting up a home media server

[jamietallman]

I'm looking for advice on a problem I have. Here are the details:

I am a coach and I take a lot of videos that I need to share with my athletes. These videos are either .MOV or .AVI files and they are typically each less than 2 seconds. They are short clips of their technique that they watch to study. I take the videos on point and shoot cameras. The file sizes are typically between 2-10 mb, depending on the video quality I take them with. I usually try and take the highest video quality I can.

The athletes need to be able to watch these videos over the Internet. I handle a lot of these videos, typically 40 or so once a week. I keep them separated into folders and rename each video. This process alone can be time consuming. I have a web server running on my home computer and I allow browsing directories and they can go through the folders and download the video files to watch.

It works well and is easiest for me as I don't have to do anything but rename the files. This I like.

However, the athletes complain that it takes awhile to download. I don't have a big upload pipe (and won't be getting one) so I'm looking for any other answer to make this situation better.

A solution needs to be easy and fast for me to put lots of short videos on my site. It needs to be hosted on my server. It needs to be faster for people to download. It would be nice it was flash based. It needs to be free or cheap. Perhaps a converter tool that I could batch convert these to a smaller file type that is more easily downloaded.

Does anyone have any advice that could help me improve my situation?

[edDV]

This will do it all and more. You even get an IP to allow users to log in and view.
Only problem will be if too many access at once. Your home internet connection will be uplink limited.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/computer/categories/home_servers/1/accessories/GG795AA%2523ABA

Read about it here
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/whs.asp
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/whs_hp.asp

[edDV]

Alternative is to upload to a third party server so players can access from there. Maybe one of the team sponsors has a server with big pipes?