Most compatible web video

I would say having the videos in Flash (FLV)

After all a majority of broswers will have the Flash Plug-in installed and it would play on both Mac and Windows without a problem. Hey it worked for Google and YouTube

6914708 said:

Currently I compressed the videos in h.264...

Click to expand...

Why? MPEG4 (Quicktime 6 and later) or Sorrenson Video 3 (Quicktime 5 and later) are much better codec choices than h.264 (which is Quicktime 7 only) when putting stuff up on the web.

Flash would be the most compatible because as someone said above, pretty much everyone has flash installed. Why don't you offer the video in H.264 and WMV formats so all of your visitors are happy.

6914708 said:

Thanks, I had no idea what codec to use. I tried .flv as well, but people were having issues with that. I am going to give MPEG4 a shot. When I compress into mp4, should I select h.264, MPEG 4 Improved, or MPEG 4 Basic?

Click to expand...

Actually what I was thinking was that you would output as a .mov using MPEG-4 Video (also sometimes listed as Apple MPEG4 Compressor as the compression type). The h.264 is too new for some people and they would need to update to watch it (when it comes to movies, flash and pdf files I tend to keep my compatibility one or two versions back from the most current... you can reach a much wider audience that way).

Yes, more people would be able to see a .mp4 file, but I'm not totally sure about how well it imbeds within a page.

I just checked your site using Quicktime 6.5 and it seems to be displaying video now (it wasn't the first time I went there). And 6.5 has been out for a pretty long time so that should be a pretty safe version to be compatible with.

6914708 said:

I kept the .mov, but used h.264.

Click to expand...

Now it is back to no video (just audio).

I'll agree that most of the time Flash Video is the most compatible, but at times, it does piss me off.

Well, the one that worked was using MPEG-4 Video which is a codec that has been included in QuickTime since the release of version 6 (November of 2002) and the one that doesn't was using H.264 which is only part of QuickTime 7 (and was first released in January 2005).

Anyone without Quicktime 7 on their systems is not going to see your video if you use H.264.

The thing is, even though H.264 is based on MPEG-4, it is not MPEG-4... it is a derivative codec made by Apple.

Like I said, to reach the largest audience you shouldn't use the cutting edge file formats. You should aim back a ways, and supporting QuickTime 6 is a good way to do this.

Also, you don't need television frame rates for web video. Your movies are at 28.22 FPS (broadcast television is 29.97 FPS). Taking the frame rate down will let you increase the picture quality while keeping the file size small. Feature films run at 20-24 FPS... I've found that between 15 to 20 FPS works fine on the web and doesn't overly tax older systems.

6914708 said:

The videos are now in MPEG-4, but look pretty fuzzy. They need to be around 1-1.5MB in size so that the user is not waiting around for it to load, it needs to instantly play.

Click to expand...

Oi! Some of your clients with dialup and budget broadband will dispute the "instant" aspect of a 1 Mb video...