Most platform independent format?

Hi guys.
I am all new to the whole video exporting stuff and such.
To make things short: I got a movie I want to export into a format so that EVERYONE regardless of what platform he is using, can view it without any problems.

I bought QT Pro, just so you know
I've encountered the following problems:
avi videos - Bad quality, big pixels = ugly
mov videos - wonderful quality, little file size BUT: does not run on any platform, pc noobs like mom and dad wouldn't know what to do!
mp4 videos (h.264 codec): no video / garbled video in Windows Media Player audio works; in VLC Player it looks greyish, distorted.

So what else would be left then?!
Which format would work "out of the box!?"
And why does it not just WORK on winblows pcs?
Well, the last question was more a rethoric question...

Thanks in advance for any help!
Flo

Regular mpeg format (.mpg - I think it might be officially called Mpeg-2, not 100% sure on that though.) has always worked the best for me. I've viewed .mpg videos on both my Dell and all of my Macs no problem.

It's worth a shot anyway, there aren't many other formats to choose from that I'm aware of. That's funny that the .avi's are bad quality, I've viewed several that were DVD quality... maybe it's their compression.

Anyway, check out the .mpg format and see if that works for you.

the quality of .avi s depends on their compression, also depends if its divx avi it should be top quality.

however, i do not prefer the .avi format, not sure why...

if i were u i would use .mpeg/.mpg format, it works on both windows and mac (i'm pretty sure).

But the best thing would probably be flash, i kno most people think that flash video sucks, but it all depends on the quality setting, 98% of computers have flash, and its easy to distribute. trust me do some research on flash video.

if the setting is high quality it will look ten times better than youtube, almost dvd quality. but for flash you do need Flash from adobe

kmkl said:

if the setting is high quality it will look ten times better than youtube, almost dvd quality. but for flash you do need Flash from adobe

Click to expand...

And that can be a sticking point. Many dollars just to distribute some video to mom & dad. I'd just have them download QuickTime for their Windows box.

Flash does seem to be officially supported on Mac, MS Windows and Linux, so at least that is a big positive. Apple and Microsoft ignore Linux, so you'd have to rely on some third party that may not be as reliable.

If one wants to distribute beyond Mac and MS Windows, then Flash seems like a reasonable solution along with mpeg video. One problem might be that QuickTime on OS X does not support mpeg 2 without an add on. This complicates matters for mom & dad.

Since my video is meant for family and friends, I've taken the stance that I'll only produce QuickTime .mov files and now only H.264. My intended audience has either OS X or MS Windows access, so I have no reason to cater to other platforms. Flavian, consider who your intended audience is and live within that parameter.

i forgot to mention that flash DOES cost a fortune, along with all other adobe products