Any suggestions for online video format?

I've got a website that has, at any given time, a few dozen 2-3 minute video clips. I'm currently converting the files to mpg and keeping them to about 4-5MB in size. But the files are small and bad quality.

I'm looking for a better format to use that is widely compatible and a reasonably size. What has worked for other people? Any suggestions?

I see the video Apple puts on their site, and I'd love to use that (I assume it's quicktime), but I suspect the file sizes would be too large.

Anyway, thanks for any suggestions you might have.

The userbase is varied. It's an adoption website, and we probably get more Windows users than anything. I used to use basic Quicktime, but I got some complaints from people not wanting to install QT. I figured mpg would be more universal, but I'm not at all happy with the quality. MPEG-2 is better quality and would work, but that requires a codec or something to be installed, which I'm trying to avoid.

Eidorian said:

I agree with the complaints about Quicktime installation. MPEG-2 is a tad bit old though.

I know the movie length, what about the resolution? Is there anyway you can live with a slightly larger file size? Any idea on the connection speed of your users?

Flash can be an option but I have little experience with it. I'd be more then happy to try some sample video if you're able to let me tinker with it. I understand the need to protect your media though.

Click to expand...

I could go with Flash, but I'm not a huge fan. You can see a sample here:

http://www.idahowednesdayschild.org/profile.php?id=12426

I'd also like to embed the video rather than have a link to it. I don't have a problem going a little bigger on the video file, but I don't want it to be too big. I don't know if most users have dial-up or broadband, so I want to limit the download. Maybe 8MB or so? I'm flexible on that, if the quality is good enough. The current resolution is 232x176, but I would like to get that a little bigger, too.

Yeah, the artifacts are nasty. Thanks for the help. I'll play around with Flash and see what I get.

Well, I played around with some conversion, and I can actually get a nice looking video for the size I want. Certainly worlds better than what I have.

The pain is redoing my site to accommodate flash. I've got some php files to modify...