What is the best video ormat to use
December 3, 2007 12:00 AM
Always a bone of contention this one. Which video format to use depends on the end users.If they're home users, then FLV is a good idea, as most home PCs seem to have an up to date version of Flash player installed. Unfortunately the same is not true of the corporate world, where many users cannot update and/or install programs for security reasons. I often find corporate users with Flash 6 or 7, sometimes no Flash player at all.For corporate users you tend to have to go for a lowest common denominator. If there are any Windows 2000 users, then this means Windows Media, probably using Microsoft's MPEG4 V2 CODEC, as this shipped with Windows Media Player 6.4, which is usually installed on Win2K boxes. If they are XP users, then WMV 7 is usually safe to use, as this shipped with the initial product.If your audience is Mac users, then QT is an obvious choice, but generally I recommend avoiding QT for PC audiences, unless you want the support issues that asking people to install it causes.Quality wise there are a lot of considerations, but generally you can make a talking head look pretty good at around 150kbps these days. You have to think of how people are going to access the media: local HD, CD, LAN, WAN, intranet, internet, and what the speed and reliability implications there are. I do loads of video in courses and generally use anything from 100 to 300kbps as the courses have to be multi-purpose delivery.The main thing is DON'T ASSUME ANYTHING. Run some tests on end user machines and figure out what capabilities they have first.Hope this helps.
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