We are often asked to provide our, ahem, expert advice on video formats for web. The short answer is that there is no single video format that is supported globally across all browsers. With responsive and adaptive design being the new standard in content delivery, we have to aim for canvassing a much larger audience and range of devices, which means preparing each video in 3 different formats - mp4, webm, ogv. Table below provides a quick overview of browsers supporting each format.
|
|
MP4 |
WebM |
Ogg |
|
Internet Explorer |
YES |
NO |
NO |
|
Firefox* |
NO |
YES |
YES |
|
Google Chrome |
YES |
YES |
YES |
|
Safari |
YES |
NO |
NO |
|
Opera |
NO |
YES |
YES |
* Firefox 21+ running on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista, and Android now supports MP4
The good news is that we are the ones creating all the video files during initial build and you do not need to concern yourself with the intricacies of video conversion and compression. All we need are the uncompressed, high quality video files (usually Quicktime) and we do the rest, including preparing files for instantaneous playback.