Embedding videos in web pages/Firefox

Question

I'm writing a webapp that would run on a device using Firefox to display a bunch of videos. The videos can be huge, up to HD quality, and would be using a large display.

I would like to be able to queue videos, i.e. have them run one after another. I'll also have some ajax checking if there are new videos to be displayed, so I need to be able to dynamically load them. I also have some script that I need to run between videos, so I need to be able to respond to the end of each video.

Note that I'm in control of the environment, so I can make sure the needed plugin (Flash player or QuickTime, etc) and codecs re installed on the machine.

The question is: what's the best video format for me to use? FLV or MP4? What technologies should I look into?

Answer 1

Firefox 3.5 supports the HTML5 video tag ( see http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html ) however it only supports video encoded as OGG (Theora/Vorbis). It looks like you'll need to use a flash based player for now at least. I would recommend going with MP4 because it's already supported on the latest version of Safari and Chrome.