Web Video

[AndyNSDS]

What is the best approach to adding video to your website? Host on google video? encode with QT or flash? How should I integrate it into my website? Should I have it embedded or set it up as a text link download. I am a bit concerned with Bandwidth issues so I'm thinking a text link might save me some hassle on that because only people who really want to watch the video in the first place.

[thecoalman]

Last I checked Goolge reencodes your video, if you famialir with video you would know this is not soemthing you would do on purpose. they really have no choice because they want it in the foram t that works for them. Put in on your own server if you can.

The format really depends on your audience, for general purposes I'd suggest WMV. Anybody with a Windows machine going back to win 98 will be able to play it from fresh install. Users for mac and other platforms have support and due to it's popularity will most likely have something installed.

After that I'd suggest flash, for ultimate compatibility use MPEG1, the issue with MPEG1 is that it requires approx. 4X the bitrate compared to WMV or other MPEG4 derivatives.

As far as how to link to it if you don't want to directly embed it in a main page you could create pop-up page with the player embedded in that.

[wolfadeus]

Don't know about the BEST (depends on what you want), but the easiest is probably YouTube: upload & embed.

That's what I have started to do on my site last week and it looks quite nice.