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What are the best file formats for viewers to see them on? There are so many and I don't understand the benefits from any of them. What should I be doing to limit the file size, I want to imbed the video onto the home page rather than create a link to it.
Are there good website services like youtube that doesn't force advertising on my web video on my website?
The biggest advantage with Flash is that it streams the video and is available to any OS or browser with the plug in. Combine it with SWFObject (Javascript) and you have a page that degrades gracefully if they don't have Flash.
The other options are to create two versions of your video: .wmv for PC based users and .mov (QuickTime) for Mac users. You'd probably want to just embed the .wmv with a link to the .mov for Mac users, or vice versa, depending on what your stats tell you.
You can also use .mpg format, but I've found it quirky depending on what player the user has to handle the movie.
If you're embedding the video flv w/flash or if you want to be adventurous WMV w/silverlight.
For direct download it gets tricky as the user needs the codec installed, MPEG1 would be the most universal and should play on any platform. After that WMV simply because of the sheer number of windows users and they do have tools at least for Mac for viewing them.
MPEG needs about 4 to 5 times the bitrate or filesize of WMV and other mpeg4 variants.
You can also use .mpg format, but I've found itquirky
MPEG1 should play on anything, even win95 has it installed. However XP doesn't come with a mpeg2 codec out of the box but it usually gets installed with additional software. Usually a DVD player because that is what DVD uses. I believe Vista has one though.
I have flash and it keeps giving me fits after converting it.
How are you converting it? Are you using the Adobe Video Encoder or directly within Flash?
I've seen "some mpg2 formats" error in converting to .flv in both Flash and the Adobe Video Encoder. I presume this is due to my video compiling program creating an outdated version of mpg2. If I re-compile in mpg1 it converts it fine.
Keep in mind an .flv won't play by itself, you have to create a Flash player and either import the whole .flv into the player or reference it as an external data source. You can also just drop any video into a Flash timeline and let it expand to the number of frames in the video, but not recommended as this is kind of counter to the point, using Flash to stream. In this scenario it will require the whole Flash .swf to load before it plays.
The Adobe tutorials seems as though it does not directly match up with the program.
It's important to note that a great deal of what you do in Flash is dependent on the publish settings for each document you open. For example, if your publish settings are for ActionScript 2, and you attempt to apply or find AS 3 features, they won't be available or just won't work. (I may be off here, perhaps it's the Flash version in publish settings which inherently supports certain versions of AS.)
You would create the player using Flash itself. There are video tutorials in the help files within Flash.
An alternative is to use Swish which also creates web-deployed Flash, but I've never used it.
