Convert 3rd party video for website

[haggul]

We have permission to display videos from various manufacturers of products we sell on our site. They provide these videos as WMV / AVI etc.

At present we just display a link to the file on our server, and let their browser / software take care of the rest.

What we would like to do is embed these videos in the page as I'm sure they would get more use, with an embedded player (as per the usual Youtube type setup).

Some questions :

Should we convert all video to on single format?
If so is Flash video the best format?
Can anyone recommend software for this please?
Whats the best way to then embed these files in the page?

Many Thanks.

Chris.

[phranque]

this WebmasterWorld thread has a few ideas worth considering:
Rough Guide to Web Video 2007 [webmasterworld.com]

[Robert Charlton]

This thread has an excellent discussion of video format conversion and formats for the web....

What are my Options to Convert .wmv?
I need cross platform compatibility.
[webmasterworld.com...]

As you may already know, Flash has become the de facto cross-platform web standard, largely because of YouTube. It's very expensive to host Flash video yourself, though, so most small sites use YouTube for hosting and embed a player in their own pages.

When hosting on YouTube, it's wise to add your own site's titles and identifiers to the video. This may create some issues with the manufacturers who produced the videos.