elementary explanation of what format to use for my videos on my website

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elementary explanation of what format to use for my videos on my website
by bill mounts on Sep 13, 2011 at 4:29:28 am

I am a video producer just learning how to create websites. I want to post my website for my video production business but I am having problems with a choosing the right format and the right compression program for that format. I am starting with uncompressed SD quick time movies. I have noticed an abundance of fantastic looking video on the web that appears to be flash files flv. Anway, I have created flv files with adobe media encoder, but I can't even open the file up to look at it. Why? How hard can this be? I've tried taking it out of premiere and AE, but with the same results. Any advice or link to advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

bill

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Re: elementary explanation of what format to use for my videos on my website
by Craig Seeman on Sep 13, 2011 at 5:27:30 am

Most modern Flash files should be H.264.
Flash is extension agnostic so H.264 .mov would work. H.264 .mp4 is a bit more "universal."
You can use H.264 .mp4 (for example) in Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime, Windows Media Player 12, HTML5. Although profile and other aspects can impact how they play on some devices, generally H.264 .mp4 is extremely versatile. The .mov variant will work in most cases as well. Many these days are using the same file in Flash and HTML5 to cover most of the bases. That's why YouTube plays in Flash in your browser and also plays on iPhone and iPad, which don't support Flash.

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Re: elementary explanation of what format to use for my videos on my website
by bill mounts on Sep 13, 2011 at 6:23:31 pm

Thanks. I actually was choosing MP4 on the first list rather than H.264 which is why I was having problems but I just did some experiments and they seem to have worked, at least on windows media player on on QT. However, I did try to open up the MP4 I created in a Mozilla browser from my html doc and it did not work. Do you know of specific problems with Mozilla browsers not playing MP4 files? safari worked fine. thanks
bill

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Re: elementary explanation of what format to use for my videos on my website
by Craig Seeman on Sep 13, 2011 at 6:53:15 pm

[bill mounts] "Thanks. I actually was choosing MP4 on the first list rather than H.264 which is why I was having problems"

.mp4 can work with several codecs. You'd want H.264 .mp4 and not the older MPEG4 .mp4.
WMP 12 can handle H.264 .mp4.

It seems most Mozilla browsers are now only natively supporting WebM in HTML5. That's not a widely used codec nor do I expect it to be. Mozilla browsers handle Flash just fine with the plugin. That does mean the file needs a Flash wrapper though, not the raw H.264 .mp4.

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Re: elementary explanation of what format to use for my videos on my website
by Mike Smith on Sep 20, 2011 at 7:17:01 pm

Video file formats and codecs are areas of live debate ; there's no agreed video codec in HTML 5 (or other web standard).

Apple is favouring H.264 codec, on which a group of rights holders collect patent fees.

Google is favouring VP8 codec, in a WebM wrapper - codec and wrapper do nt attract patent royalty payments.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/google-launches-open-webm-web-video-form...
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_vp8.html

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