

Ask HN: Video format for Web and Mobile? - evo_9

I'm starting a new start-up and one of the requirements is to be able to show video on the website and various mobile handsets (iphone and droid to start).<p>I haven't been able to come up with a good strategy at handling this particular part of the requirement. Seems like there isn't really any straight answer, so I guess I'm looking for what have others done to minimize the 'pain in the ass' factor with video right now.
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Rust
With my last client, we found that the proper encoding of a video to h.264
would work equally well as a Flash streaming file, iPhone/iPod/iPad video
link, Android video link, and <video> tag source (in browsers that support
h.264 - use OGG for Firefox).

Realistically, given the different resolution, something like 480x360 (4:3)
for mobile devices and 720x480 for browsers is fine for standard definition
video.

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evo_9
Thanks, that's a great suggestion. I always get tripped up with the
'container' versus the underlying codec.

Edit: thinking about this further, what container did you use that works on
everything? Mp4?

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Rust
Yes, MP4, with h.264 inside. I don't remember the exact settings offhand, but
we were just using x264 and ffmpeg to convert files.

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evo_9
Thanks, good to know.

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brk
Based on going through something similar myself right now...

If you don't have to show live video (ie: just video clips), your best bet is
probably to convert the video to a number of different formats and/or sizes
when it is uploaded, then detect device type from the request info and then
serve the appropriate video stream/size.

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evo_9
Yeah that's sort of where I'm leaning too. I thought maybe YouTube might be
another way to go but I didn't see a way to make the videos private but still
available via a custom Ui (mobile/web).

