HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Here's a list of some other popular video hosting services:
blip.tv
—
http://blip.tv/
n
Dailymotion
—
http://www.dailymotion.com/
n
Flickr
—
http://flickr.com/
n
SmugMug
—
http://www.smugmug.com/
n
Viddler
—
http://www.viddler.com/
n
VideoPress
—
http://videopress.com/
n
Which video hosting site you choose is a matter of taste and ease of use. Each site has its
own video player and its own community, and you should choose whichever suits you
best. Be sure to check out the restrictions on video length and video resolution when
choosing. For example, the maximum length of videos on Flickr is 90 seconds, and only
users with Pro accounts are allowed to view them in high definition (HD). There's also
no rule that says that you can't upload your videos to more than one site. You may want
to upload your videos to Vimeo for the purpose of embedding them on your own site and
upload them to YouTube to make them available to YouTube's audience.
For any number of reasons, you might want to host video yourself instead of relying on a
third-party service such as Vimeo or YouTube to host it for you. For one thing, you can
use your own player rather than using the one they provide. You also may not want to
include branding or advertising from a third party on your own site, and you might not
want to distract your users with a link to YouTube. As is the case with most third-party
services on the Web, hosting your own video gives you more control over the end result
but requires more work and expertise on your part.
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At one time, a wide variety of methods were used to embed video in web pages, each
with its own browser plug-in and file format. These days, just two common methods are
in use. The first is to use a Flash movie to play back the video, and the second is to use
the HTML5
<video>
tag to play the video using the browser itself. I'll explain how to
use both approaches, and how to combine the two to support as many browsers and plat-
forms as possible.
Before diving into the tags used to publish video on the Web, it's important to first
explain how to create video files that can be played in a browser. Understanding how to
create video files for the Web is the first step in getting video from your camcorder or
mobile phone onto web pages.
