What video type for my website?

I own a wedding videography company that has a website that I'm currently reworking from the ground up (iWeb code is slow and bloated) using Dreamweaver.

We need a few videos online for demo purposes, but I can't decide on what format to go with, Quicktime (.mov) or Flash (.swf or .flv).

Quicktime looks much better at the same file size, but I don't know if Windows Internet Explorer plays well with QT. Flash on the other hand, looks decent, has small file sizes and is compatible with all (most) up-to-date browsers.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

I would go the FLV route. Flash is now bundled with pretty much every browser release. Chances are most (if not all) people will be able to see your videos and hopefully pick up the phone and call.

I second the .flv choice.
They load faster, and they are much more compatible with different browsers.

As a rule-of-thumb for video through the browser add it into Flash in whatever format it is and let Flash do all the compression. Nowadays Flash's compression ratios are excellent and like has been said almost everyone has Flash. If you need to shave a little of the file quality you can alter the quality to size ratio in Flash for each individual video.

By the way if you're trying to avoid bloated code don't use Dreamweaver. Get a text editor and do it by hand.

DrQuincy said:

As a rule-of-thumb for video through the browser add it into Flash in whatever format it is and let Flash do all the compression. Nowadays Flash's compression ratios are excellent and like has been said almost everyone has Flash. If you need to shave a little of the file quality you can alter the quality to size ratio in Flash for each individual video.

By the way if you're trying to avoid bloated code don't use Dreamweaver. Get a text editor and do it by hand.

Click to expand...

First, I agree that Flash is the best way to go, because it is the standard video format for online viewing. Second, I have windows running on my Mac through Parallels and yes Internet Explorer can handle Quicktime videos. Third, I agree that you should not use Dreamweaver, if you want to avoid any unnecessary code. However, I tried to embedd FLV files, using HTML code but it only worked with the SWF format and there were no controls to pause the video (probably because I did not use Javascript for the player, instead of HTML).