What format should i post my movies on the web?

[Jeremiah77]

I use imovie to edit my shorts then I export it. I used to export it to .mov format but recently i started exporting to .mp4 for some reason I thought .mp4 would be more universally readable by players, because a lot of people were telling me they couldn't view quicktime movies. Thoughts?

 

[Nick Mougis]

there is really no excuse for people to not have quicktime. that said, most porn sites encode their movies as mpgs, so you know that most people can read them. 2 is still a pretty good format... i don't really use 4 for much of anything. As long as you don't use real player or windows media player formats, i guess you're ok.

 

[Ute Giddeon]

MPEG-4 is a superior codec to Sorenson 3, which is likely the codec you were using for your QT movies. Additionally, it's cross-platform compatible, meaning QT or WMP or Real will play it. Its implementation in FCP3 is buggy, though. So make an MPEG-4 and a Sorenson 3 version of the same thing, making the encoding parameters as similar as possible, then compare the outcome. Go with MPEG-4 if it's working satisfactorily.

Like Nick said, anybody not able to play QT movies is way behind the curve. Fuck 'em.

The most obvious advantage of QT is its cross-platform compatability (in terms of the Operating System). It's the most robust of the three media programs in many ways, and is the most sensible choice for web encoding. That said, the Window Media Codec has superior visual quality when compared with Sorenson.

 

[Ute Giddeon]

ignore this post