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I need to pick the formats for an upcoming sport video portal. Since we are about to transcode a huge stack of videos, this decision is somewhat crucial. I can choose from
FLV (VP6), M4V (H.264), OGV (Theora), WEBM (VP8)
and any combination of these.
Obviously, I'd like to be as future proof as possible but the catch is, every transcoding option will cost aditional money on each video clip.
Now I'm really tempted to ditch FLV and OGV and just go for M4V for mobile and WEBM8 for desktop with a fallback to Flash player with M4V content for whichever system doesn't support WEBM. (and I know that those are still the majority)

I guess the real question is:
- How do you see the future of WEBM?
- Will it make its way into all those browsers I rarely use (FF, Opera, IE)?
- Am I missing something here?
- What's the best choice in your opinion?

Thanks for your thoughts!
thomas

thomas
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2 Answers2

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Just have a look at this support table: WebM is supported by most browsers and plugins are available for any browser too. M4V covers you for the two that don't support it. So your plan to go WebM+M4V+flash fallback seems pretty solid to me. WebM ain't a patent minefield like M4V, so I wouldn't worry about its future.

hynek
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I like this barebone mix using a HTML5 video player with auto Flash fallback:

2 X H.264 sizes (one for desktop and one for mobile) Desktop: IE9 + Safari Mobile: iOS, Android and Windows 7. 1 X WEBM for HTML5 browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome 1 X Fallback Flash (VP6) for IE 6-8 and all older browsers versions that do not support HTML5

You can obviously go into a lot more granular detail to target mobile devices and tablets, but if cost is a big issue that is a good starting point.

How are you going to encode the library and do device detection? Which player are you going to use?

user17050
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  • Hi, I use zencoder now with 3 formats (mp4 for desktop, m4v for iDevices and webm). Device detection and playing is done by flowplayer 5 – thomas Jan 23 '13 at 12:42