Video has been an ongoing challenge for us. As much as I sometimes regret it, we have our own Adobe Streaming Media Server separate from our web server. It means that 95% of all Drupal modules out there do not work for us without additional code. And the remaining 5% may CLAIM that they will work, but don't.
Video is a tricky thing.
I had a situation where I wanted individual nodes within a view to appear different from one another. (e.g. add additional spacing at specific places in a grid view, color code the grid for easy scanning, etc) To accomplish this, I tagged each node with a series of taxonomy terms associated with various traits.
Recently I developed a site for viewing switch maps. Basically, each switch was it's own node, each module within the switch was it's own node, and each individual port within each module was it's own node - all linked using node reference fields.