What is the best way to serve videos on a website?

Question

I want so serve some videos on my site. They are available as .MP4 files gotten from a FlipShare camera.

Now I tried converting them to WMV (which succeeded, but when embedded in html in a <object id='mediaPlayer' width='320' height='285' classid='CLSID:22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95' etc' tag, users have to install an addon and the user experience of 10 Windows Media Players on the site isn't just so good.)

So then I looked at youtube and wondered how they do it, but I can't figure out what format they convert the video to.

So my question is: What format do I have to convert my video to, to show it in a player which does not need to be installed in the users browser. What tool do i need and what is the html code to embed such a video?

As you can see: starting from scratch.

PS: I often hear: This or that file extension is just a container, there can be anything inside. If you're using this in your answer, can you explain this to me, because I never understood this. For me a .cs is a c# file and a .doc a Word file, and not 'a container'.

Answer 1

This question requires a re-answer now that it's no longer 2010 and HTML5 videos (as utilized by most video hosting sites) and chunk-based videos (sent as responses to periodic XHR requests - as utilized by Youtube) are the norm. While there is no best way to add video to your site, Flash is definitely nowhere close to even being good as of the time of writing of this answer.

The simple un-researched answer is: Just use a video tag and it'll work out!

This is simple and intuitive, and should work fine in many of your use-cases.

The researched answer is: Unfortunately, upload the video on Youtube and embed it on your site.

The pros and cons of embedding on Youtube over just having a video tag:

The pros:

• Allows you to offer your video in a multitude of qualities.
• Very bandwidth efficient. Youtube is bandwidth efficient for your users since it reencodes videos, and is also bandwidth efficient for you since you'll no longer be serving your videos off your own hosting.
• Offers features like closed captions, automatic subs, playing at multiple speeds, full screen player, etc.

The cons:

• It's a very heavily monetized service, chances are they'll want to put ads on your video if any of its content isn't 100% originally yours.
• It has very strict laws/terms and conditions that you need to adhere to, at least in my opinion.
• It tracks your users. If your application requires privacy and you can't rely on your users to protect themselves, then Youtube isn't ideal.

Other alternatives that mix the pros and cons of those two options are:

• Using a Javascript video library to get HTML5 video along with some of the pros of using youtube, but none of its cons.
• Using FFMPEG on the server side, for bandwidth issues.
• Using some CDN that supports video to deliver the video, for reliability and bandwidth issues. My current favorites are ones that rely on service workers and the bittorent protocol, to stream from users to each other, but whether that suits you or not depends on your application.
• Using AWS storage services to store the video, and AWS gateway/CDN services to serve it, which might be a great solution cost-wise and efficiency-wise if you don't want youtube but don't want to store videos on whatever infrastructure is serving your website.

Sources of this answer: Personal experience. As much as I didn't want to answer from experience, this question really needed a new answer! Feel free to edit it with something more concrete.

Answer 2

Converting your video MPEG-4 with H.264 will get you 97% coverage on current browsers across desktop and mobile, although some Android devices don't support hardware acceleration for this format. To address that you could also serve WebM with VP9 codec.

I wrote up a summary of browser support that might be useful: https://stuartk.com/posts/whats-the-best-html-video-format-to-serve/

Answer 3

This isn't an easy question. The basic answer is that you need to use a format that the user's computer already supports. There is no one answer to this question. YouTube encodes videos as MP4 and embeds them in the page with a Flash-based movie player, and Flash is pretty widely supported, but you'll notice that Flash isn't available on a lot of mobile platforms — so anybody using an iPhone is shut out if you go the Flash route.

HTML5 introduces the video tag, which is meant to solve this problem once and for all, but there's still a hiccup even there — most HTML5-enabled browsers support h.264-encoded video, but Mozilla supports Ogg Theora instead. YouTube is currently experimenting with a <video>-based player, so this does seem like the future.

I believe the current best practice to support the most people possible is to encode as h.264, try to serve as a <video> element, and have a Flash-based player as a fallback if that doesn't work (which can play the same h.264 file).

Answer 4

I'd say the most popular solution at the moment - utilized by YouTube and other major video portals - is H.264 encoded Flash-based Video. Flash can play Video since... I think Version 8 or 9, and has since gained significant market share.

My personal favourite Flash player is LongTail Player, but it isn't free for commercial use.

Here's a SO question with a list of Flash based players including open source ones.

Flash won't play on iPhone and iPad, though.

If you want to support computers with Flash Player 9 (I've seen some around, but I don't have any hard numbers) you will need to encode FLV files (which use a codec named Sorenson I think).

The upcoming alternative is HTML 5 Video but suport for that in browsers is nowhere near a major market share.