Thanks to the efficiency of the free market and the effectiveness of the US patent system in spurring innovation, the market dominant operating systems use incompatible and patent-encumbered video formats, and Linux users must break the law to view either.
Originally I encoded all videos with h264 in MPEG-4 containers. MPEG-4 play very well in Quicktime, so they'll work fine out of the box on Macs and just as well on Windows, if you have Quicktime for Windows or RealPlayer installed. On Linux you'll probably need to download codecs from a less enlightened nation. Google appropriately, e.g. “opensuse+mpeg4+codec”. MEncoder and Transcode are other Linux options.
In practice it turns out that almost nobody's computer plays any format other than what youtube uses: flash. So all movies are now in flash - for details click here.
The .ogg file is “Ogg Theora,” an open-source, unencumbered video format and container. If you can't view any of those, try a more standard browser.
emacs tag:
Last modified: Mon Dec 3 00:12:13 IST 2007
subversion tag: $Author: predrag $ - $Date: 2010-09-23 10:19:48 -0400 (Thu, 23 Sep 2010) $