How can I embed any type of video onto a webpage, youtube seems to be able to upload any type of video and I'd like to know if I can do that too without huge amounts of resources and money (the website would be very small with definitely under 100 member, most likely under 50)
Is there a player that plays all formats, or would I have to use different players?
Also on HD videos I'd like to have a SD option.
There is no player that plays all formats. You would either have to restrict the containers and codecs usable, or farm off reencoding to another process.
shwup.com can host collaborative video albums to share amongst friends / family / classrooms only. unlimited uploads. since you want private sharing.
another cool way is to use one of the video APIs to upload/encode to the cloud, e.g.: YouTube Data API, Vimeo API, Hey!Watch, Orb, Phanfare
For players: JW Player is pretty nice.
Flowplayer is great as well.
if you have ffmpeg on your host, that can easily handle conversion between most popular formats
if you're doing tons of encoding and self-hosting the files, another option is uEncode.com - an on-demand web service to convert between formats
also you could just upload the files to a regular account on one of the sharing sites like youtube, veoh, and embed them in your site. let them provide the bandwidth :)
I use JW Player: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW%5FFLV%5FPlayer
YouTube uses ffmpeg (free and open-source) to convert uploaded video to a Flash format for embedding. You can do the same, if you like.
Decided to use Divx webplayer, as it does avi, divx, and mkv (mts can convert to mkv easily)