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  • 09:45:25 am on June 7, 2010 | # | Comments Off on Preparing Video for the Web
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    If people are like onions, Quicktime movies are like sandwiches…

    If I asked you, “Do you like sandwiches?”, you would probably want to know what kind of sandwich. I wouldn’t want to say, “I love sandwiches!” and then have a Muffuletta dropped in front of me (which I really do not like).

    Quicktime movies (or files with a .MOV extension) are similar. Movie files are usually made of two tracks: an audio track and a movie track. Audio and Video come in many different formats each but as long as Quicktime likes them, they can be combined to make the video sandwich that an MOV is. A quick look at the Wikipedia page for Quicktime reveals at least 132 combinations of audio and video that could create a Quicktime file.

    So, what does this all mean for putting video on the web? Well, most of the time we are not using the Quicktime player to watch video on the web. We are using the Adobe Flash plugin to watch video or in the case of sites that are preparing for HTML 5 media, the browser itself is decoding the movie for the viewer. In both of these cases, the delivery tool is MUCH pickier about what it will eat than Quicktime is and audio/video has to be prepared a little more carefully.

    This sounds like a lot of work, but generally it is just a matter of finding a tool that will make this easy and lucky for us there are a few, and I’m going to focus on two: Quicktime Player and Evom.

    If you have Snow Leopard on your OS X computer, Quicktime Player is able to do an excellent job of saving files that are ready for the web. Just open the file and choose “Save for Web” from the file menu. You will end up with a file that should be perfect for your web site.

    Another option is to use Evom. Evom is a free application for OS X that will let you drag and drop a video on to it and have it converted to a web-ready format that should play easily. There are several ways that you can use this tool, but I recommend the following steps.

    1. Drag and drop your file on to Evom
    2. Choose HTML5 as your format
    3. Convert it
    4. You will end up with two files (OGV and MP4), throw away the OGV
    5. Use the MP4 file

    Hopefully, these steps will help you create a movie file that will work great on your web site.