Mobile Video Formats - What are your users downloading?

[boynation]

I am currently in the process of trying to decide what mobile formats to encode my videos into for download from my site. I wanted to get some feedback from those of you who have mobile video formats:

-- What do you offer?
-- Which formats are most popular?
-- Can I offer ONE format, or do I need to offer several?
-- Can I encode for one and that one can be used on several devices?
-- Should I offer an iPad download format?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Best,

Laurence

[HunkyBen]

We are finding that the easiest format is mp4 using the .h264 codec as it is totally iPhone compatible and the vast majority of our mobile users are accessing the sites from an iPhone. Another advantage of this format is that it is fine for iPad as well.

We did some testing with other mobi phones from other vendors and they too were able to use an mp4 vid, and when they did not it was simply a matter of downloading the mp4 player for the make/model. I did look at encoding to the iphone specific format, which is m4v, but then it was an issue with other phones, ditto for .mov.

There are also other standards like .3gp which I believe are used on earlier gen phones that have displays but are not really "smart" phones. Basically we decided not to bother with that group as our research showed 90%+ were using iPhones anyhow. Since launching we have not had even 1 user complain about incompatible videos.

let me know if there is anything else, but I think there are a number of others out there that are far more familiar with all the details of video encoding so I will hand it over to them for more info!

[boynation]

We are finding that the easiest format is mp4 using the .h264 codec as it is totally iPhone compatible and the vast majority of our mobile users are accessing the sites from an iPhone. Another advantage of this format is that it is fine for iPad as well.

We did some testing with other mobi phones from other vendors and they too were able to use an mp4 vid, and when they did not it was simply a matter of downloading the mp4 player for the make/model. I did look at encoding to the iphone specific format, which is m4v, but then it was an issue with other phones, ditto for .mov.

There are also other standards like .3gp which I believe are used on earlier gen phones that have displays but are not really "smart" phones. Basically we decided not to bother with that group as our research showed 90%+ were using iPhones anyhow. Since launching we have not had even 1 user complain about incompatible videos.

let me know if there is anything else, but I think there are a number of others out there that are far more familiar with all the details of video encoding so I will hand it over to them for more info!

Thanks Ben! Since I will also be encoding into QuickTime, I have been told that I don't need to worry about the iPad as iPad users can download the Quicktime version for a richer experience. I will take your advice and just encode for h.246/M4 at the iPhone/Android screen size.

Laurence