I am preparing a project proposal for a client who wants to publish video in his website. I need to define which video formats will be allowed, which video sizes, as well as the necessary tools for conversion and preparation.
I have no experience with embedding video in websites so which markup do I need to play video online?
You could embed them using a flash player, like Youtube for example.
A quick way to do this is using some already made player, like the excellent JW FLV Player, free for non-commercial projects and very cheap for commercial ones.
It supports FLV and MP4 video files, you can convert your videos in this formats in a lot of ways, for example using ffmpegx.
I suggest you have a look at Camtasia, for most of your request:
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp
If you just need to embed Flash. FLV files in a page then JW Media Player for Flash:
For what it's worth here is a example of embedding video using the media player plugin.
<embed src="http://aaa/bbb/ccc/myVideo.wmv" type="application/x-mplayer2" pluginspage="http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/" name="MediaPlayer" autostart="1" showcontrols="1" showstatusbar="0" autorewind="1" showdisplay="0" height="256" width="320">
As a slight aside, you may want to check out Panda. In addition to its video transcoding abilities, there's information about how to embed the video files on your website.
Check out Microsoft Expression Studio 2. They offer an encoder that will encode a variety of movie formats.
I second Davide Gualano's answer above.
Make sure you make your client aware of the size of the video (review vimeo and you tube to get an idea of sizes vs length vs quality) and work out how much traffic they are going to expect to get on the videos.
Bandwidth can become a large cost for people that underestimate this area.