There are several steps involved in getting video on the web.
Working backwards, you need a way of showing your video on a web
page. These are called viewers - and there are several:
Flash Players (there are a variety of these)
Quicktime
Windows Media Player
Real Player (not recommended because of the way it
automatically takes over some of )
How you video gets displayed when you click on it's hyperlink in
your browser depends on the html coding associated with the file..
For instance, MOV and MPG files that are hyperlinked will download
and then cause whatever program that is associated with that file
type to open and play the file.
Before we compress down to the mp4, we render out our original
video to a lossless setting (uncompressed, PNG, etc) and make
sure that it is deinterlaced (no fields). Sometimes when you
compress an already compressed file (ie DV to DV to mpeg4 to
mpeg4-h.264) you end up with some serious blocking and
artifacts. Getting as close as you can to the original footage
in as high of quality as possible is always the best bet.
