making a media player compliant file for the web...
 

Hi,
has anyone got any ideas what to use once I have an avi or mpeg in order to convert it so that the average pc newbie would be able to just download the file and watch it without having to download a silly number of codecs? All of my wedding preview files I make now work on some peoples pc's but not everyones. does anyone know the best way to make something thats compatible with everyones version of windows media player without having to download extra codecs? If it means the file has to be less compressed and therefore larger then so be it.. i just need something that everyone can watch!
thanks a lot
David

WMVs should work fine on PCs (and the compression is excellent), but I don't know about how they'd play on Macs.

Most compatible cross-platform is probably Flash SWF.

To awnser Roberts question, I have not run across anything that the latest quicktime player won't handle on my mac.

Mike

That's really good to hear Mike. When the time comes to publish my site, I'm probably going to go with WMVs, at least for awhile. Good compression and easy to tweak straight out from Vegas.

quicktime is fine but obviously its necessary to download the player.
Do any wmv's play without having to download codecs? despite what codecs I have on my computer? I might covert somehow and get a few friends to do a test download.
many thanks

I'm pretty sure Mike meant that Quicktime on a Mac will play WMVs. On a PC, Windows Media Player would be the default player, shipped with Windows, that plays WMVs. (WMV stands for "Windows Media Video")

Quicktime will play WMV files thanks to Flip4Mac. Its free, but it still may require a download. In fact, I believe although I'm not a 100%, if you try to open a WMV file from within Safari without Flip4Macs software, it will take ask you to install their software to continue.

yeh i know a fair bit about wmv's, i just didnt know if there were different codecs needed for different levels of wmv.. or are they all pretty much universal?

you want to use wmv 9 to encode windows media files, not the older wmv codecs... you can download the free windows media encoder from microsoft, it does a good job.

try to avoid using mpeg's as source files for encoding web video, the quality just isn't there.

excellent, thanks to everyone for their help.

Take a serious look at using the new Flash8 video codec. The image quality to compression is the best thing going right now.

There is a product that Flix that was developed by Wildform and recently purchased by ON2 Technologies.

You can actually create your own players and have tem either embeded in you webpage or pop up in a sperate wndow on your site.

The Flash codec is cross platform and compatible on 99% of the browsers on the internet. The only drawback right now is that the new Flash8 codec hasbeen out only about 6 months, so there might be those out there that don't have the update for their browser yet.
Although you if someone doesn't have the new codec yet, they will be directed to the Flash site for the update automatically, and is super easy to install.

Check it out here.

http://www.on2.com/technology/flix-features/

what about from the presets already loaded into premiere pro? I have been playing around with the export settings today and notice that all the quicktime files i make seem to be quite large in file size compared to their resolution and audio quality. Another problem I'm having when exporting to .wmv is that I cant lower the resolution of the video in order to improve the quality slightly, it always seems to stay on 320x240 and I'm more looking for 280x210 kind of size.
any ideas?!

when I was hunting around for information on web movie conversions, i found one amazing package that does it all in a couple of clicks, and it saves so much time

http://www.avsmedia.com/VideoTools/index.aspx

it's worth the money...it's perfect for anyone who wants to make wmv's, movs, flash swf's, video ipod movies without ever having to think of codecs and compression!!

The Flip4Mac player is really nice. If you buy the full version, you can encode wmv right from quicktime, and it does a great job.

I use Squeeze to encode flash video, and I can make it compatible with player v6, which has quite a large installed base as opposed to v8. Plus, while the compression is not quite as good as v8, it's stunning what you can get with just Squeeze.

To see it, go to http://www.popdesignworks.com, click on Flash/Video in the main nav, then click on "Cincinnati Bell Commercial", then click "Watch Clip" in the lower right corner. It'll pop open a window with a flash video in it, with the standard Flash MX 2004 controller, saved for flash player v6.

Dan