What video format for website.

F

fadedjosh

Well-known member
I an in the process of rebuilding my site, (basically the site is just for fun and shows some of the projects I am working on) and am wondering what would be the best option for the viewers pleasure. I use to have Quick time on it before, but the majority of the people that watch my stuff are at work and QT is not available to them.

So I setup a vimeo channel and am wondering if its too "Cheesy" to just embedded the vimeo videos directly to my site. I have thought about it and the only cons I can see is that it looks somewhat unprofessional.. But at the same time I dont really think anyone is going to care too much about that type of thing. Also some of my files are pretty big. 50-345mb

I could offer small med and large QT formats to each video, but thats a pain.
Your thoughts?
 
you can customize the H264 settings to a faster bitrate etc.

I absolutely hate codecs and such. I usually have someone else do it for me. There are so many variables and compressions! I understand what you are going through!
 
I'm no web guy, but it seems that flash is appearing more and more lately... even more than H.264 in my recent experiences.

Web people! what's your opinions (I'll be making a new site soon too)
 
Someone recently asked me this same question for their community theater website. I told them just to use YouTube. The reason why is because by doing so your videos are not only easily available to your website visitors but also to the massive audience that visits YouTube. Opening up many more doors of opportunity to be seen.

Does it look professional (having that little YouTube logo on your video)? Heck no! But their video player is so common (even major studios use YouTube) that people don't even notice the logo any more and just focus on the content of the video instead. Which is what counts.

So I say just use YouTube to embed the videos onto your site and also provide a link to a hi-res Quicktime version if they want the best quality.
 
Unless you don't mind the poor poor quality of Youtube videos, that could be an easy option.

However, I think the problem as you put it:
hats what I have been using on the prior site. h264 1500 kb mpeg4 aac 98kbs

The videos turn out great. But I sometimes get complaints on having the video taking way to long to load...
Click to expand...

Your bit rate is a bit much for the average user. We studied stats here at my work and found that the highest we could push our bit rate to was about 700kbps for video and 128kpbs for audio (for Flash's on2 VP6 codec) and the videos look good at a decent size. So maybe try lowering the bit rate on a couple test videos and see if you can live with the quality. If you can't then I doubt youtube will make you happy.

As Ryan said:
flash is appearing more and more lately... even more than H.264 in my recent experiences
Click to expand...

Flash is great to use. Highly compatible, however implementation is different... if you are using Dreamweaver select the option to add a flash video and you can select a skin and drop in the video. Be sure to get the On2 VP6 codec, as it is the best for flash.
 
While h.264 may look prettier, Flash is more Universal at this point. There are a lot of QT movies I can't even watch on this machine, but Flash is no problem.
 
QT was it for me for a while but I now see that Flash is the way to go.... I have Flash encoder CS3 but it's a single pass encoder, which sucks.... On2 VP6 codec is what I'm going to invest in.
 
I strongly recommend using Ogg Theora. You can stream it via a Java applet (so your users don't need to install a codec), and there aren't any licenses or roaylties to pay as there are with most of the other formats.
 
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