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Harold58

Q: What is the best alternative movie file for Mac / windows use on a website??

Need to have windows user able to access our movie files on apple made website

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on May 8, 2016 5:07 AM

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Q: What is the best alternative movie file for Mac / windows use on a website??

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  • by QuickTimeKirk,

    QuickTimeKirk QuickTimeKirk May 8, 2016 5:20 AM in response to Harold58
    Level 9 (53,075 points)
    May 8, 2016 5:20 AM in response to Harold58

    Windows users would have used QuickTime Player and its browser plug-in to view your videos.

    But browser plug-ins are dead and Apple has ended support for the Windows version of QuickTime Player.

    You'll need to rewrite your page source code to the new HTML 5 standards. You don't have to edit your current videos as they will work with modern code.

  • by John Lockwood,Solvedanswer

    John Lockwood John Lockwood May 12, 2016 4:24 AM in response to Harold58
    Level 6 (9,220 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    May 12, 2016 4:24 AM in response to Harold58

    Harold58 wrote:

     

    Need to have windows user able to access our movie files on apple made website

     

    This involves two levels.

     

    First you need to support a 'player' plugin in web-browsers and this needs to be one obviously available for Windows users in this case. In the past this could have been QuickTime which is still supported by Mac web-browsers but Apple have just discontinued QuickTime for Windows and therefore you cannot rely on this for Windows. In any case it would require Window users to have installed additional software i.e. QuickTime for Windows. Other options are Adobe Flash but this will not work on mobile devices e.g. iPhones and iPads, and even on desktop computers is regarded as being a pretty horrid solution even if it is (unfortunately) still a widely used solution. The current 'modern' and best option is as QuickTimeKirk referred to which is to use the HTML5 standard which includes a way of defining the use of a HTML5 compatible video player in the web-browser. This is supported by all modern web-browsers on Mac, Windows and mobile devices and does not require installing any additional software.

     

    The second issue is the video codec you use. If you had been using either QuickTime or Adobe Flash as the player then these have various video codecs they would support but I will skip over this because as above both I and QuickTimeKirk are recommending you use HTML5 instead. For HTML5 there is a different list of supported video codecs, these are MP4, WebM, and Ogg. Of these I would strongly recommend using MP4 and I am sure QuickTimeKirk will agree. Fortunately for you MP4 is the preferred format for Macs and iOS devices.

     

    Note: MP4 means H.264.

     

    As you will see here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Browser_support H.264 is by far the most widely supported choice.

     

    So to summarise, write your webpage to use HTML5 and the built-in HTML5 video player, and encode all your videos as .mp4 i.e. H.264 files.

  • by Harold58,

    Harold58 Harold58 May 12, 2016 2:47 PM in response to John Lockwood
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Quicktime
    May 12, 2016 2:47 PM in response to John Lockwood

    Thank you John,

    That explanation helped me very much. HTML5 will work for me as my video is MP4 already.

    Thanks again.

    Harold