formatting video for streaming

[inscrewtable]

Currently I'm simply saving clips as a .mov file and uploading to Amazon s3 for playing on my Wordpress site. Generally these are low res clips usually less than a couple of mins, to maybe about 10 mins. They seem to work ok, but I'd like to use best practice and so I'm looking for the best way to prepare clips so that they load and stream as effectively as possible.

At the moment I'm using quicktime 7 pro, to get them to a small size I choose the 'share' option which opens up an email and put a small file in which I then drag to the desktop to upload to Amazon. But I'm sure there's a better way to do this, I have noticed that generally if I upload to youtube I get messages telling me that my file is nicht so gut, as it were.

What should I actually be doing. Should I use iMovie, or Final Cut or some other software, and what would the best settings be?

thanks

 

[Murgatroyd314]

For transcoding videos, I like Handbrake.

 

[Michael Anthony]

Use Handbrake or Quicktime 7 Pro. One thing I learned yesterday is that the current release of Handbrake doesn't support all formats of audio in some .mkv files, at least some I ran across, but last nights' nightly build worked fine. I use quicktime from sometimes too, the most important thing for compatibility is the format the video as H.264 and use the .mp4 file extension.