Hey folks,
I am putting some video on my client’s site, it is a software company and they have some demo videos of their product.
I have already written a javascript video changer UI and I have been considering hosting the video on youtube but I wish to pursue other options so I am open to suggestions?
Must work on IE 6 and 7 and all modern versions of IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari.
I look forward to hearing your ideas 
I really like the free version of Flowplayer:
http://flowplayer.org/download/index.html
Hey ,
Thanks Ralph, flow player rocks, definitely going to go with it! I do have another question about file-size, what would be a reasonable format and file size for a 20 minute video. I do not have any experience of converting and compressing videos for the web.
thanks
To be honest, I don’t know any more about it than you do, except that I’ve taken a few videos of clients and converted them to web-friendly formats. How small you make them is a trade-off between size and quality, of course, so it’s worth experimenting a bit to see what works best. To take YouTube as an example, a 20 min video is likely to be quite a large file, possibly over 100 MB in some cases, but I’d rather not download all of that, and I’m sure most users wouldn’t either (well, some just couldn’t). I’d say it’s a question of getting it down as much as possible without making the video unwatchable. Perhaps you could break it up into a few sections.
Thanks yeh thats pretty much what I thought. I need users to be able to stream this file and my client has mostly corporate heavyweights who will have fast broadband but I would like to get this sorted so that I know how to compress video for smaller clients too. Bit of reading around the subject methinks 
My experience is so limited that I’ve just used iMovie ( a free program with the Mac) to edit the original files and then save in a web-friendly version. There are various settings, like the quality you’d like it saved at. I know there are various free programs online that you can use to prepare a video for the web, though I don’t know their names.
One program that was helpful to me when readying an AVI for Flowplayer was Riva FLV Encoder. Flowplayer is a bit tricky about the files it will accept. Some particular files refuse to work for no apparent reason.
Thanks Jason,
I will bear that in mind
We’ve recently done this for my company, and YouTube works brilliantly !
You can record and upload the video in AVI format (I think they accept other formats as well), and YouTube will automatically convert it into different qualities (360, 480, 720p) depending on the source resolution.
The size doesn’t matter that much, as YouTube will let their users stream the video in the (quality) format of their choice, so if they have a slow bandwidth they can simply adjust it themselves.
Also, we used the built-in YouTube tools to annotate the video with text boxes, and that worked fine too…
If you look at our video, it was a 225 mb avi file, and YouTube fixed the rest.
Click the big button in the middle of the page to view it :
(we have no sound, only annotations)