today shot video for the first time with my Nikon camera… it was a parade with very colorful costumes, some of them came out nice…
videos are shot in .mov format (don’t think camera can shoot in .mp4)
so my first question would be what is the best way to convert .mov video format to .mp4? I searched for
“video convert from .mov to .mp4”, and got so many results don’t know where to begin…
I’m on a mac… are there any built-in tools that come with the mac to do this?
(I’m assuming video cannot be embedded on a web page in .mov format)
Even though HTML5 is becoming standard, they still haven’t standardized the format that plays in each browser. Some .mov will work, and others .ogg will work. The solution I use was to allow the user to select their own media player choice. Either will work in one of the players, and a user usually has more than one installed. I use a server-side browser sniffer to select the default, and if the default player is wrong they still have the option to change it.
Movies can be embed via the OBJECT element so yes QuickTime *.mov can be embedded within a webpage though a lot of times the filesize is large. Hence the why like *.mp4 tends to be preferred over *.mov plus the latter MP4 has wider compatibility.
Ogg is an open-source file container/format, though most people say “.ogg” are referring to Vorbis (lossy audio sitting in an ogg container, rather than video (Theora)). It was created specifically so there would be a patent-unencumbered format anyone could use, sitting under a BSD license.
It’s probably very likely that, for HTML5, the list of formats/containers people will be regularly listing will not include ogg simply because now that Firefox3.6 support is getting dropped/was dropped by most developers writing HTML5, every browser who supports the ogg format also supports one of the other big ones too (mp4 and webm).
thank you for your response, Markdidj… I know how to sniff stuff on the back-end too (user-agent, host, those typical things…) so you can sniff from the back-end what player the user has installed on their machines? how do you do that? (I’m on JSP, but well, I suppose all I need is the name of that env variable…
so you’re saying encode the video in .ogg and .mp4, maybe, then sniff on the back-end what player user has installed? neat…
Each browser has a default player. Sniff the browser and offer the browser’s default player as the user’s default player when the page loads. Allow them to change it if they wish. Harder to do in IE, as WMP seems to try taking over every player choice. Chrome seems to work the best at allowing user’s player choice. I think .ogg is the default filetype for a Mac, so you might want to sniff OS too.
