Video compression and reaching an audience

I make videos for my site and I've been compressing them to WM9 at 512 kb and the quality is decent. However, I was wondering what format (Quicktime perhaps?) would be best to increase the number of people who could potentially watch the video, as not everyone has windows media or winamp. As far as I know, Mac users are unable to watch my videos. Any ideas?

 

QuickTime would be a much worse choice than Windows Media. Much, much fewer people have QuickTime than Windows Media. I'd recommend that you stick with it...

 

If you have the disk space, why not offer both? Thousands of website offer alternative formats like Quicktime, Windows Media and RealMedia. I used to have a fan film online that I made available in Quicktime and WMV and found that Quicktime was actually downloaded more often.

That and the fact that practically every single movie website has Quicktime downloads leads me to believe that mystikmedia is wrong about which is more popular.

You might also want to look into Flash video... that would actually be more popular than either format.

 

Who told you that practically every single movie site uses QuickTime? That is definitely false. Even the most popular ones don't. I will agree with you on Flash. It would be a better option than MOV. WMV would still be best because everyone who uses Windows already has it, but Flash would be next best.

 

If you go to a major movie site, ANY major movie site, they will offer Quicktime trailers. Find me a major movie site that doesn't and I'll reneg.

 

Yes, I was not arguing that. That's smart of a major site because they want to be compatible with EVERYONE. So, they provide QuickTime, which will work for the Macintosh people. You made it sound like you were saying the major sites used QuickTime exclusively or even favored it. If you are only going to provide one format, it should definitely not be MOV though. That's what I was saying. After re-reading your message, I may have just misunderstood what you were saying though. It didn't seem like that's what you meant until later posts. My apologies if so.

 

Would it make sense to have WMV and Quicktime or WMV and flash? I currently have the disk space so it's only a matter of reaching more people.

 

If it were me, I'd probably go with Flash, but MOV would achieve the same goal...so, it's really up to a personal preference.

 

WMV works on all Windows operating systems. However WMV won't work on Firefox as a plugin. Also, it may not work on Linux and other oses.

Quicktime requires Quicktime. It may be hard for people to accept it because of the large download size but at the same time, a lot of people download it because iTunes is bundles with it.Also, people use it for watching trailers.

All this considered, it's a hard call, I would tend to use Quicktime Or Real Media (Real Player and so on).

Technically, Quicktime offers a bit more than WMV because it has by default support for H264 which offers good quality on very small bitrate. Same thing applies to Real Media.

If I would have the bandwith and space, I would offer WMV, Quicktime, a lower quality of Quicktime and maybe even real media.

 

quicktime did not fully implement all of the h.264 spec... i think that it won't do bi-directional prediction, for instance? if you use nero to create h.264 for the web, you'll see that there is a switch for making h.264 into a qt-compatible file... so qt h.264 does not have better picture quality than wmv, or probably even flash 8(on2 video codec).

none of the major video sharing sites on the 'net use qt, it's all flash 8 and wmv... even the porn industry standardized on wmv a long time ago, because in part it's the only real drm out there.

so for the best player penetration, it's flash 8 or wmv... don't bother with quicktime.