Creating digital video can be quite the headache for newbies because of all the different file formats and video containers available. But if your goal is to upload the video to your website host and embed it to a webpage, you can narrow down the selection to just 4 video formats – MP4, FLV, WebM and Ogg. Determining the ideal video format for your website is just a matter of crossing out the inferior formats one by one.
Right off the bat, you can cross out highly popular FLV format. It is a great format to consider for people with slow Internet connections but it relies on Adobe Flash Player which means that anybody without the plugin won’t be able to watch the video. That also includes all iOS users since Adobe Flash content isn’t supported on any mobile browser.
WebM and Ogg look to be attractive options because they are both open formats. This is only a big deal if you are hosting a commercial site that targets a wide audience and you are worried about the legal mumbo jumbo surrounding the H.264 codec. Still, the main weakness is the lack of browser support. Sure there are a lot of Chrome and Firefox users but Internet Explorer and Safari videos won’t be able to watch your WebM or Ogg marketing videos. The bottom line is, stay away from these formats.
This leaves MP4 which is the modern Web video format that uses the H.264 codec. It is not only supported by the latest versions of all major Web browsers both desktop and mobile but it is also provides great video quality and good compression. A 5-minute 1080p video should be about 100 MB and since you are dealing with marketing, 720p should suffice. When you upload a video to YouTube, you can actually download an MP4 version of the video using a third-party tool. In fact, YouTube is continues to be a simple and effective way to get your video on the Web since you can then embed the video to your site.
But uploading the MP4 file to your website has its benefits. For instance, you can customize the video player using HTML5 and you can use embeds to build the links back to your domain. So no matter what software you use to build videos, export them to MP4 format and everything should be fine. As for the legal stuff? Give this article a read and you should feel at ease.
Great article! I will go for MP4. I have been looking for something better but looks like MP4 is still the best option.