Newbie Movie clip in website

Question

I'm totally familiar in making static and dynamic websites. However, I have never dealt with multimedia in a website. I want to build a static website that has movies placed on various pages. The movies will be supplied to me (I will not be making them), I only need to place them on pages.

My questions are...What format (file type) should the movie be in (I am not familiar with Flash, is that a movie type file?, are there others?)

I have the option to tell the people making the movies what type to make. What should I say, and should I include a size range (I'm assuming its sort of like an image file?)

Once I have the above things worked out, I'm assuming I'll have some movie files. Is placing them on a page just like placing image files?

Any help in getting me going is greatly appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

Upload them to http://www.blip.tv, and they will give you HTML embeddable code for your site. You can upload mov, wmv, etc, all to Blip. They will convert it for you and handle the dirty-work. All you'll have to do is copy/paste the HTML code they provide.

Answer 2

The best way, in my humble opinion, is to embed video files uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo or other video uploading websites.

Answer 3

This generates HTML for embedding common multimedia types:

http://cit.ucsf.edu/embedmedia/step1.php

You can look at those for guidance.

Answer 4

One problem with Flash movies is they won't play on iPhones.

Answer 5

One word, Youtube

http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=132460