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Ask HN: Video formats for web use.

1 points by CarolineW 15y ago

I'm looking for a video format that can be embedded into PDFs, Powerpoint, HTML, etc, and which works equally well on Macs and Windows. Linux a bonus. The only thing I've found so far is animated GIFs, but they're HUGE. Please, suggestions and advics requested, as I'm having trouble achieving universality of experience for my users. Thx.

Rust 15y ago
For the web, you want MP4 (h.264), OGG (Theora) and WebM to be able to play in all browsers using Flash as a fallback (Flash will use the MP4 file). If the computer viewing the Powerpoint presentation has Quicktime installed, an MP4 (or MOV) can be embedded in the PPT. Acrobat can also embed MP4 files within a PDF, and seems to use Flash to play it back. So, using an MP4 h.264 will get you a number of browsers, Flash, PDF files (assuming Acrobat is used to view them - I suspect Foxit and other 3rd-party readers won't do this), with the caveat that the person viewing the file may need to have both Quicktime and Flash installed. OGG and WebM will get you the rest of the browsers (see http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html for more info).