Video Encoding questions

Question

I have a lot of .mov and .m4v files of various sizes. I want to encode them to play inside and HTML5 video container. the element is interesting and pretty advanced.

I know that Safari/WebKit can play an .m4v and that in Firefox I need to use a .ogv.

My question is what is a good size and frame rate for these so they are small in size and fast to load? I will need to have multiple versions browser depending...

• Quicktime on OS X lets you encode for the Web, but I dont see where it makes it any different than the original.

• ffmpeg2theora lets me get to .ogv format.

Where does .3GP (3G Phone) come in? Is that for very slow (i.e cell) connections?

Answer 1

Proper encoding of .mov will allow progressive caching(play before it's fully downloaded). It may require a plugin for the format (quicktime, mplayer, gstreamer, whatever), but I see it used well frequently.

what is a good size and frame rate for these so they are small in size and fast to load?
is completely an inadequate question...the lower the frame rate and audio bitrate the smaller and faster it will be, but 1 frame per second will not produce any meaningful video(except maybe a slideshow and there are better ways to do that)