I'm building a short film site and I need an opinion on what format to use. Unfortunately flash isn't available for what I'm using, so I have a choice between windows media player, quicktime and realplayer. I'm leaning towards quicktime because of a number of advantages such as: -H.264 codec -more people may have quicktime since iTunes came along -good broswer player I think the only problem would be the number of people who actually have quicktime installed, but maybe someone could confirm the numbers. So what is everyone elses opinion on this?
I'd go with mp4. That way it can playback in WMP and QT, probably also Real Player. There are also browser plugins for VLC, Osmo4 and I think CoreCodec have one. Why exactly can't you use flash? VP62 offers decent quality and most people (still no 64bit flash plugin I don't think) have flash installed.
Forget RealMedia. I tend to agree with celtic_d in that you need the widest degree compatibility, so go with MP4. Don't know much about Flash implementations, but one thing I can say as a security guy is that lots of folks, esp. corporate users, disable or uninstall Flash for security reasons or filter SWFs at border points. It's hard to keep up-to-date (reliably), especially on a network of more than a few hosts.
So how will the browser or whatever decide which player to use. Also, what's some of the good compression codecs for mpeg4 I was also thinking someone might have some statistics on media players worldwide.
