Advice on embedding video content via CMS - what format?

Question

Hi, if I set up the facility for people to embed video content on their site via their CMS (using TinyMCE editor), is there any reliable cross platform video format that should be used? From what I can find online, the only reliable way to embed and stream video is using FLV. Other formats seem to have caveats, e.g codecs required or quicktime updates required. Ideally I'd like to avoid this type of situation. If it is the case that FLV is the preferred option, then that involves asking people to encode their video content to FLV before uploading, so there is an extra step required here (unless I can set up the encoding in the back end, but this might take a while to process depending on the size of the video).

Does anyone have any additional advice on this? The types of video i'd imagine people will be working with is raw camera footage, so i need to figure out the easiest and most reliable way of getting the footage on to a web page.

Answer 1

Flash video, via sites like YouTube and Vimeo, is definitely the way to go. Users just need to upload videos to a site like that, and they can embed videos that way. Once you offload the hosting to a 3rd-party site, you don't have to worry about any of the details beyond having Flash installed/enabled.

Answer 2

This is a hard one so I'm going to answer you in parts.

The video format / codec:

While FLV is one of the most used formats it's quite inefficient when we talk about compression. Big sites like Youtube switched to MP4 with the H264 video codec. This codec has a much higher compression then the native FLV codecs (H263). Switching to higher compression codecs will save you some bandwidth.

The player:

While there are quite a lot players around I recommend JWPlayer. This player has been actively developed and is able to run MP4. (most flash players can run H264 btw)

Encoding:

If you want to avoid people having to encode their files on their own you coul install FFmpeg on your webserver you can make use of this library trough php: FFmpeg-php

Things to keep in mind:

Keep in mind that on the fly encoding on the webserver could eat some resources. Also HTML5 is coming soon and that will make all flash players obsolete (mac made the decision not to use Flash in their mobiles / pads).

All with all this won't be easy since you have to keep many things in mind.