convert for use on youtube

[Gary Aitken]

>> Now I'm trying to convert to something smallish that will play well on youtube.
>> According to youtube's analysis, my firefox supports 
>>   "HTMLVideoElement" and "WebM VP8".
>> I've tried converting to
>>   .avi, .mp4, and .webm
>> but whenever I try to play them via youtube, I get the garbage about my 
>> browser not currently recognizing any of the video formats available.
> 
> AVI is just a container format. Which formats (video and audio)
> did you put in? For example, XVid for video + MP3 for audio, or
> MPEG for video and AC3 for audio? With mencoder, you have control
> over those formats and their options (for example quality, image
> size, audio sampling rate and how much compression should be used).
> 
> You can test with "mplayer -identify <file>" to check what is
> _actually_ in a file.
> 
> The web browser only supports playing video content in few formats,
> and usually either through a "Flash" player or WebM standard, if
> the required plugins, libraries and codecs have been installed.
> Everything else requires an external player program (even though
> there are browser-plugins for some players).
> 
>> I've tried switching the browser between HTML5 and the default player,
>> but no joy there.
>> The browser successfully plays .mov files previously uploaded, but they
>> are huge and I'm trying to save on bandwidth and storage.
> 
>> I believe the
>> uploaded .mov files were converted by youtube anyway.
> 
> YouTube converts them either into "Flash" video (flv) or
> whatever they currently use to deliver with HTML5 (VP8?),
> as far as I know.

Thanks.
I created different .webm files with vp8 and vorbis and uploaded them,
but they didn't play (over a period of several hours).
However, some hours later they do play; apparently there's some magic
done to them *after* all of the upload processing is supposedly done.
Or at least that's what it appears like. 

An uploaded big .mov file plays right away; in what form it's fed to the 
browser is not at all clear to me.  However, this might all be a feature
of time of day and the youtube load.  Is there an easy way to tell what 
the content being served to the browser actually is?

In any case, thanks for the info on ffmpeg and mplayer.

Gary