Best export format for Amazon S3 hosted videos

Thanks for the excellent comments!

The viewing will be done only on the internet and embedded in a website using the JW Player from Longtail video. Either their single player or one of their multi-video players. Most of the videos are in a series so I might have three or four within a series of videos. The multi-video players would be idea for this situation.

Since I will always have the original source of the videos I could re-export into a different format for a different purpose (i.e., DVD).

So if I understand what you both are telling me, either MP4 or FLV would work equally well. However, the FLV extension would work for more Flash Players.

Thanks!

Frank

That's correct...  :)

CyanBlue

Thank you both for answering my question.

My understanding of how Youtube hosts its videos is that they only use the FLV container for streaming and when you upload a standard res video they used to use the Sorenson Spark or VP6 codec with mp3 audio. When they announced High Def as an alternative they still used the FLV container but with the H.264 codec (MPEG-4 AVC Part 10) inside and AAC audio.  When you upload a HD video YouTube reencodes it to the Flash container but keeps the original. So if you've uploaded an MPEG-4 video they make it available for download in its original format.  Not sure about what they do with other formats.
But with JW I've encoded FLVs with the H.264 codec inside and they stream nice.
I've actually changed to Flowplayer -- found it a bit better to use.

Thanks fredshovel for the additional information. I will check out the Flowplayer.

Your sharing of this knowledge is much appreciated.

Frank