How to embed video on in HTML page

Question

sorry for the convoluted and subjective question, but multimedia is totally out of my area of expertize.

I know there are several alternatives to embed video on a page. There is HTML 5 <video> tag, there is video/ogg content type which seems nobody uses, there is Flash SWF embedding or Flash FLV progressive, I think Silverlight has something and finally there is external hosting.

My needs are for a commercial site video tour, it has to be fairly good quality. Good hosting is around USD $100/mo (I looked at viddler.com, the ones 37signals use), over my budget. Is there a good, commercial, hosting at under USD $20/mo ?

So I'm considering the alternatives. I believe my best bet is on SWF, is a tested technology, supported by plenty of platforms. Besides I'll need to use their charting components anyway later down the road. What tool do I need? Standard Flex Builder, Professional Flex Builder or I can use the free Flex SDK?

What other alternatives are there?

Answer 1

There are already many Flash applets that will play video in any browser that has the Flash plugin (as new as possible, hopefully). For example, Flowplayer is pretty much ready to use out of the box. All you have to do is embed it on your website and point it towards whatever video file you want to show.

I assume you're not hosting the next YouTube, in which case a quality webhost with generous or unlimited bandwidth caps would be enough. (I have used Site5 for $5/month before and haven't been banned, at least :p).

As for quality, generic FLV uses an older codec that's not so great. Newest flash player can use the excellent H.264 codec (what YouTube uses for HQ and HD video) in MP4 container (take a look at this tutorial). Of course, the higher the bit rate, the better the quality, but the slower the video loads.