How to host your own video and make an embedable link for viewing across the net

Question

I want to host my own video, and then be able to view the video by having an embedable link

I dont know where to begin, so I need to know every little detail. For example, do i save the video file as a video file, an mp4 f.e., and then have some sort of video player so that i can view the embedded video??

Answer 1

Upload the video to Vimeo or YouTube, let them do the hard work.

Okay, so you want to host it yourself. Convert the video to MP4/H.264/AAC format using Handbrake or ffmpeg, then embed a Flowplayer player into your webpage. If MP4 doesn't work, try FLV. (YouTube serves both of these formats.)

If you want to avoid Flash, most popular browsers now implement the HTML5 <video> tag, which allows embedding videos directly. Unfortunately, the codec support is a very big mess of patents and ideologies, and those who choose to use <video> have to resort to publishing several different formats including a Flash-based player.