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Forum Discussion
What's the best Dropbox plan to make sure my video doesn't have limited playback?
Hello,
I would like to host a video on Dropbox that I will add to my website and loop the playback. The video is short - 10 seconds. This website page will be opened about 300 times a day and the same number of times the video will play. Can you please tell me which plan I should choose so that I won't be limited in video playback?
- Nancy
Dropbox Staff
Thanks for posting on our Community today, MarinaDSGN!
Just to make sure we’re on the same page; how would you like to add your video file from Dropbox to your website? Do you want to share it there via link and have users play the video from a preview on your website?
In general, even if you’re on the free Basic plan, users can stream your video up to 30min (you can also see more info in this Help Center article).
The only thing to keep in mind is exceeding the daily sharing limit of your Dropbox account, which is also described here.
Please let me know if you have any other questions, or in case I’ve misunderstood something.
I want to add a video via a link, I will add it to the code and the video will play automatically. I'm just afraid of exceeding the limit and that the video will not be available for my website visitors.
- Rich
Super User II
I want to add a video via a link, I will add it to the code and the video will play automatically. I'm just afraid of exceeding the limit and that the video will not be available for my website visitors.
Dropbox wasn't really intended as a video hosting/streaming service, at least not as you're planning to use it. The playback/preview feature is meant for sharing and collaboration. If the intent is to just provide a link for people to click on to watch the video, that's fine, but if you plan on embedding the video on the page itself and have it play automatically on each visit, you really should use a proper web host to serve the file.
Is there any reason you can't place the file on the same system that hosts the website? Then you wouldn't have to worry about bandwidth limits from Dropbox. The file would load from the same system that serves the web page.
- Mark
I'm just afraid of exceeding the limit and that the video will not be available for my website visitors.
There is no way to guarantee this won't happen with Dropbox. Ultimately it isn't designed as a hosting platform or tool. I cannot strongly recommend enough that you dont host it via Dropbox, you are almost certainly going to have bandwidth issues OR issues if/when Dropbox changes its file sharing structure - as it has done before.
