FLV is rockin these days.

I offer mostly WMV's Ipod, my cam archive plugins are all flv

Which programs convert to ipod format? I'd love to know more about it.

All our videos come in two formats, one for instant streaming for which we use FLVs, and one for downloading the HD videos, for which we use WMVs.

If you do Flash I highly recommend investing in the Flash Media Server because then members can watch the FLVs in real-time stream so there's no downloading to cache (as in "progressive download") and users can fast forward and rewind to any point at any time without waiting.

Very sweet actually, our members love it.

Windows Media (WMV) has really improved over the past few years. Compared to MPEG2 you should see some noticeable improvements in file size and quality. Be sure you'll encode using WMV9 codec (Advanced profile not necessary).

WMVs can be played by MAC users as well as long as they have FLIP4MAC.

H.264 is MPEG4 and it's what Quicktime files are based on (short, generalized explanation of course). Looks good but can't be played by Windows Media Player which is what most regular users on the web using a PC uses. Encoding tends to be slower compared to WMV encoding but this may depend on your system.

Personally I stay away from DIVX and other formats that require most users to download additional plugins or software. Most users already have Flash and Windows Media Player (or VLan or Media Player Classic) and are all set.

Hope this helps a little

Here's a free program that's a dirty little secret because it converts nearly everything, including to (and from) the ipod format. Called SUPER by eRightsoft.

I'm not associated with them in any way and don't vouch for problem free use of the program but I never had issues with it. Besides converting to ipod/zune/cell phone formats it does a good job with MPEGs. WMV is outdated tho.
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html#Dnload

there ya go :thumbsup

This is to funny, I ran a poll in my members area for 4 months asking what format they wanted to see on the site. I also had it on my blog. By reading this I can tell no one is really going with what the customer wants

that's what made me start this thread was a member asking for windows media files - so what are they looking for according to your poll?

If you're playing high bit rate .wmv files on a Mac they WILL stall, sputter, and choke. Likewaise if you play a high bit rate .mov on a PC it will also stall. Windows Media is better on Windows and Quicktime is better on Mac. BTW the Windows Media Player for Mac sucks. You need flip4mac.

We also conducted a poll on our site. Customers had a choice between wmv or mov. Results were as follows.

wmv 74.8%
mov 18.4%
Undecided 7.5%

Personally I think mov is better but these results were pretty decisive in the opposite direction. 32% even said they would stop buying our videos if we switched to mov. We're forced to go with wmv. Considering our videos are as much as 1 GB per file multiple formats is not an option.

Their reasons for chosing wmv over mov:

17.1% I already have the Windows Media Player and I'm too lazy to get the free Quicktime player.
16.3% I believe it will not play well on my computer.
34.1% I think Windows Media has better quality.
12.4% I hate Apple products.
16.3% Irrelevant question because I prefer Quicktime.

good info - thanks for posting - i got flip4mac pro btw :/

When flvs are encoded professionally, the quality is just as good as wmvs. The tricks are the codec, the process and right softwares. Following is a side-by-side comparison of flv using On2 VP6 Pro Codec against wmv using Microsoft's latest Silverlight VC-1 codec. Both have great qualities:

w w w.encoding.tv/demo/compare.htm

Sorry for the weird looking URL. Had to do that because of the 30-post limitation.