How To Encode Video For The Web

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva Jr
Total Articles: 782
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For many people this is a tricky subject, there are several ways to upload video to the web, if you have a website there are several server side applications which can help you optimize the streaming, however you must be aware that streaming from a particular hosting account requires an extreme amount of bandwidth which depends on your audience and file sizes, this is why many opt to upload their videos to social video sites such as Youtube.

As you may have noticed you tube doesn't use standard video formats such as MPEG, AVI, etc. it uses the FLV extension instead, the reason for this action is because this particular container offers a lot more flexibility as far as interactivity compared to the rest of the formats and the file sizes are somewhat smaller which optimizes media streaming.

The video resolution this site utilizes is 320X240 so it is recommended to produce and edit video at that specific resolution, other recommended resolution is 640x480 which at the moment it is compressed offers good resolution and the video will look a lot better than the rest of the videos you see around. If you are encoding ...
... video to be uploaded to these sites which have re-encoding capabilities it is a good practice to use the AVI (DivX or Xvid) container which offers better compression with less video pixelation, MPG is also a good container but the quality might be compromised if a low bit-rate is used.

Other formats which can be used to encode clips are the Quicktime extension MOV however you need to make sure how to encode videos using this format otherwise you will end up with an ugly looking video. Most sharing sites have a video length limit such as 10:00 minutes, if this is the case you need to split the video into several pieces using an application such a TMPG or Virtualdub.

At any rate, the best way to encode video for the web is to use standard video formats and resolutions which can be scaled down to 320X240 without affecting the aspect ratio, if you have a wide-screen 16:9 video it would also be helpful to use zoom then pan & scan to convert it to a 4:3 letterbox scalable ratio.