I am an intern re-designing my boss’s website and a very important part of his business is the iPhone market. He recently launched an app that has reached 500 000 downloads.
The video demonstrations that I want to encode and embed on his website MUST be viewable by iPhone users. Previously they were flash, but obviously that is no longer an option because the platform does not support it. They must also be a reasonable size because people will be using their 3G capability.
I have looked into it and it looks like h.264/mpeg-4 is the type of video file I should embed. Is this the right choice? Can someone refer me to a guide or tutorial that explains the details of embedding this type of video correctly? I want to ensure that the video samples cannot be saved onto the users’ devices just like You Tube video.
Yes, h.264 is a good option. As it is a very compatible format. You will want to use the html5 video tag. As iPhone and many other smartphones support html5. So just do some googling on that. Just know, that Firefox will not support that video format in html 5, as it is not an open source format, which goes against their way of thinking. So the moving forward of html5 is going to have issues like this. But it will work on iPhone, which is what you are looking for
This video explains the best way to go about it (h.264 with a Flash fall-back):
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/quick-tip-html-5-video-with-a-fallback-to-flash/ <<< Hope it’s useful 
PS: You can’t prevent the video being downloaded… otherwise the end-user wouldn’t be able to view it.
Thanks for the answers. The fallback option is useful because hey I just realized I’m gonna have to make sure that non-safari people can also view the stuff.
Thanks everyone.