Best video format?

I'm working on my first video project, and I'm trying to figure out what is the best format to encode in for browser/OS compatibility?

I've recorded a series of technical presentations from a workshop (these are basically screen captures of Powerpoint presentations made with Camtasia, and a separate audio track recorded with Audacity).

I first exported the videos as mp4 files (H.264), but was rather annoyed to find that IE didn't support it until IE9/Windows 7. And you guessed it, many of our stakeholders are still using IE7/Vista! Arghh!!

Flash is out of the question because it won't work on any mainstream mobile device, and many people flat out avoid it.

WMV I imagine would annoy the IOS and Android people.

Camtasia does have an 'export with player' option, which seems to output an MP4 file, a Flash player that presumably acts as a wrapper, and a ton of html, css, xml and miscellaneous junk files. It seems to work, but I really need a single self-contained file if the presentations are going to work with the Podcast module.

Surely there's a universal standard for video?

It's possible with IE9+ only and I think you should create a flash fallback for old other browsers. Well it's IE6 - 8 only

At the moment, there isn't a 'universal' video format for the web. The HTML5 video tag has different support with different browsers (look at The State of HTML5 Video).

I guess Flash is the most universal where it comes to desktop video support, H264 is universal on mobile.

Thanks, that was a very useful link. I'm shocked that there is no standard.

Longtail is probably the best solution - it will use html5 embeds where available and fallback to flash where needed - all with a single source file.

http://www.longtailvideo.com/

Each video site worth it's name has something similar. For example Youtube and Vimeo encode each video in different sizes, formats and bit rates, and they decide which video you get based on your connection speed and device. I suspect longtail does something similar.

Ok, looks like IE users will just have to tell their IT departments to move out of their cave and rejoin the rest of humanity (can you imagine anyone upgrading to Vista three years after 7 was released?).

I'll have a look at adding support for the LongTail player for the front end of the Podcast module. Maybe News and Library as well, if it works out ok.

Got the basics working, looks pretty good. If I can get the poster image to display and the track slider working, this will be going in the next release!

sounds good!

By the way, the mimetype manager in the control panel doesn't include mp4 (video/mp4) in the default list. Would it be possible to include it in a future ICMS release?

I created ticket #682 for that. It's waiting to be merged into the 2.0 dev branch.