Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Video Clips

Now that you’ve conquered the challenges of audio and learned to put everything from sound effects to looping background music into your web pages, you’re ready to move on to one more challenge—video content.

Although browsers use many of the same tools to play video as they do to play audio (plug-ins like Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and Flash), there are some hefty differences. Most importantly, video files are big. Even the smallest of them is many times the size of an audio recording of a full-length Mahler symphony. Handling this data without trying your visitors’ patience is a true test. In the following sections, you’ll learn how to prepare your video for the Web and let your visitors view it.

Preparing Video

Putting personal video on a website is a task meant for ambitious multimedia mavens. The key stumbling block is the sheer size of digital video. On a digital camcorder, every second of video can chew through 1 to 3 MB (depending on the recording quality and format you choose). Put together a 10-minute clip, and you’re looking at a staggering 600 MB to 1800 MB file. Not only is this awkward to manage, it’s enough to take a bite out of any webmaster’s server and bandwidth allocations.

What can you do to make a web video both look good and perform well? You can always use someone else’s web-ready video (or pay a video-editing company lots of money to trim yours down to web proportions). Assuming that’s not what you want, you have two choices.

• Record at lower ...