[Sigia-l] Online Video Learnings

[Ziya Oz]

Tom Donehower:

> 2.  What factors into the decision for format? I see a lot of sites using
> Flash, but was wondering if anyone could share any insight into the pros and
> cons of the various formats and players available.

To mention just the more strategic ones, excluding P2P-popular codecs, there
used to be four 'general purpose' video platforms out there: Win, Real,
Flash and QuickTime.

In the future, there'll be two: Windows Media and H.264.

Real is really over and Flash is transitioning from On2 to H.264.

For web deployment, perhaps the biggest difference between the two camps is
DRM: Windows Media has it, neither Apple nor Adobe has really come up with a
comprehensive DRM layer on top of H.264. Yet.

If the destination of your videos does/will include iPods, iPhones, YouTube,
AppleTV, Flash/Flex/AIR devices, Macs or you want to enhance the videos with
scriptable interactivity (and you don't think Microsoft Silverlight will
really be cross-platform), you'll be using H.264.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba