HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
After you've specified the settings, just click the Start button to encode your video as
H.264. When the encoding is complete, preview the video, preferably in the player you'll
be using on the Web, to make sure that the quality is sufficient. If it's not, encode the
video again using different settings. Likewise, if the video file is larger than you'd like,
you may want to encode the video again with the compression turned up. Afterward,
watch the video and make sure that it still looks okay.
Converting Video to Ogg Theora
To convert video for use with Firefox and Chrome, you'll need to convert it to Ogg
Theora. A number of tools can be used to do so. One popular, free option is Firefogg,
which can be found at
http://firefogg.org/.
Firefogg is an add-on for the Firefox web
browser. When it's installed, you can go back to the Firefogg website to convert video
from other formats to Ogg Theora.
VLC, a video player that supports a wide variety of formats, can also be used to convert
video to Ogg Theora. It's available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. You can download it
at
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/.
To use it to convert video from one format to another,
use the Open Capture Device option in the File menu, select the file you want to convert,
and then use the Transcoding Options to choose the Theo video format and Vorb audio
format.
The methods used to embed video in web pages have changed a great deal over the
years. In the early days of the Web, to present video, the best approach was just to link to
video files so that users could download them and play them in an application other than
their browser. When browsers added support for plug-ins through the
<embed>
tag, it
became possible to embed videos directly within web pages. The catch was that to play
the video, the user was required to have the proper plug-in installed.
The tag used to embed plug-ins in pages changed from
<embed>
to
<object>
, but the
approach was the same. Plug-ins made embedding videos possible, but they didn't make
it easy, because of the wide variety of video formats and plug-ins available. Publishing
video files that worked for all, or even most, users was still a problem.
In 2002, Adobe added support for video to Flash. Because nearly everyone had Flash
installed, embedding videos in Flash movies became the easiest path to embedding video
in web pages. Later, it became possible to point a generic Flash video player at a prop-
erly encoded movie and play it. This is how sites like YouTube work. As you'll see later
in this lesson, there are some Flash video players that you can use to play videos that you
