Video File Formats Best For Web

I am a 3rd year multimedia technology student, studying at Leeds Metropolitain University and as part of my studies i am required to write a research report on my chosen topic. The topic I have chosen is which Video File Format is most suitable for encoding into web for quality of playback video and upload time! Feedback would be very much appriciated as i need as much as possible for my research.

Thankyou for your help

Stephanie

 

So we're writing your paper for you? Ha. .FLV

 

.flv would be my choice IMO.
A lot of open source software on the web like ffmpeg that can pretty much convert many formats into .flv

You may also go for the h264 option. It's a plugin provided by videolan. It outputs some very high quality videos if setup properly. It can even reduce the size a lot as well.

 

flv is nice but is cpu intensive

but still .flv is the best

 

Well, this thread answered a question that I was going to ask.
Thanks a lot.

 

Thank you for your input, I was woundering however if you could give me more of a reason as to why .flv is the most suitable video file format for use in the web for quality of playback video? what about other formats such as .mov and MPEG?

Any more feedback will be greatly recieved

Thanks

Stephanie

 

Hey stefijane! Since you're talking about quality of playback - I may be the only one here that is going to disagree about the .flv format. I don't like it and I think it is quite sloppy as a format in general. It had been a web standard for a very long time but there are newer formats that people are discovering to be more beneficial for the web.

My preference within the past year or two has actually leaned more toward .MP4, which is part of the MPEG family. It's a little larger in size than .flv but still very light-weight in file size compared to .mov, .avi and .mpg. It also has the ability to maintain similar quality to that of .mov, avi, and .mpg. It's perfect for nearly any video sharing website that lets you upload higher quality videos. Not only this - .MP4 is compatible with iPhone, iPod and a huge list of other devices... Meaning it is perfect for podcasting.

From my experience, I have found that the quality of .mov can virtually be as great as you would like it to be, but the file size is almost always way too large to be suitable for anything web-related -- with some exceptions (i.e. wanting to show a long-distance client a sample). As for the rest of the MPEG (mainly MPEG-2) family, I have always been under the impression that it was designed to be use more for DVD encoding, given its wide compatibility with nearly every DVD encoding program/application out there. Good luck on your report!

 

I go for FLV. They are fast loading and good for users who have slow connection (due to small file size) or can't view high quality videos.
The only downside of FLVs are quality. Once the file size is reduced, the quality greatly suffers.

 

I think .flv is better than any other...............or avi

 

flv or swf is better than popular video format like avi, mpeg, wmv

 

Video is a science that depends on many factors, all of which have been unmentioned by yourself. Duration, size, bitrate, intended audience all play a factor into determination of format. There isn't one magic answer. If there were then there'd only be one video format.

 

FLV is the best I have known for so many reasons. One of the reasons I like flv is because the skin can be customized and a custom user-interface can be built around it, making it unique and new for the people who will watch the video.

 

I would suggest Mpeg 4 files with h.264 compression, which can be played by HTML5 players, which work on all kind of devices like iPhone, iPad, Android and more. Flv is a proprietary format which much resource hungry than Mp4.

 

.flv and mpg are probably the best for web.