Before uploading video to the CMS, you must ensure that it is in a web-compatible format. The recommended format is Flash Video (FLV), which is the format used by YouTube, Google Video, and most other major online video distributors. FLV is one of the easist formats to create, and has the best support across different computers — FLV will play on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The following free programs can be used to encode Flash Video:
- MediaCoder for Windows
- ffmpegX for Mac OSX
When encoding your video, you should set the encoder to use dimensions of 320x240 and a total bitrate (audio+video) of 500-600kbps. [Recommended: 96kbps audio, 450kbps video.]
The final size of your video should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 megabytes per minute. So, for example, a 4-minute video should be around 15-20 MB in size. This will produce a good balance between video quality and file size.
The following video formats are also supported by the CMS, but may not work consistently across all computers:
- Windows Media
- Quicktime
- Real Video
- Flash SWF
Note that the old MPEG-1 format is explicitly not supported by the CMS, as it is not a web-friendly format.