ptg16476052Hosting Your Own Video 39314
Theora is an open, freely licensed video codec released by the Xiph.org Foundation.
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome offer Theora support, but Apple and Microsoft have
no plans to support it. It’s usually associated with the Ogg container format, and the files
are usually referred to as Ogg Theora files. Ogg files that contain video usually have the
extension .ogv. There’s also an associated audio codec, Vorbis. Ogg Theora audio files
have the extension .oga.
In 2010, Google released a new container format called WebM. WebM files use the VP8
codec for video and the Vorbis codec for audio. VP8 was originally created by a com-
pany called On2, which was acquired by Google, who then released the codec to the pub-
lic without licensing requirements. WebM is supported by Google Chrome and will also
be supported by Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Adobe Flash.
Currently, if you want to encode your video only once, you can use H.264/MP4 and play
it natively in browsers that support it using the
Converting Video to H.264
One of the nicest features of video hosting services is that they free you from worrying
about codecs and container formats because they do the conversion for you. It’s up to
you to create a video file with the desired resolution, but the hosting service takes it from
there. If you’re hosting video yourself, you’ll need to convert your video to MP4 and per-
haps Flash, too.
A number of tools are available for dealing with video, but when it comes to convert-
ing video from other formats to H.264, there’s only one you need to worry about:
HandBrake. HandBrake is a free, open source application that enables you to convert
video stored in pretty much any format to H.264. There are versions for Windows, OS X,
and Linux that all work basically the same. You can download HandBrake at
http://handbrake.fr/.
If you just want to convert your video to H.264, you can open it in HandBrake and click
Start. However, you’ll probably want to tweak some of the settings to optimize your
video for use on the Web. Check out the interfac e for HandBrake in Figure 14.6. I’ll walk
you through the options you’ll want to set to optimize your video for the Web.