A question received from a subscriber to our Top Tips :

“Hello Mark – Thanks for the video tips – they are most useful. Do you have advice on the best size for a short video to upload to a website – not the length – the recommended pixel dimensions and bit rate? Do you recommend mp4 or Flash?”

My answer:

Hi Suzi

Glad they’re useful – I will make the answer to your question a future Top Tip! And of course you can ask questions – the more the better!

Before I answer – I must recommend that you consider ‘proper’ streaming video hosting (which we offer, from £15 / month), which enables you to embed the video on your site, easily and quickly, while it is actually hosted on our server – or upload it to YouTube and embed the YouTube version in your site.

Here’s why: ( from http://www.creationvideo.co.uk/webtv )

CAN WE HOST THE VIDEOS ON OUR OWN SERVER, OR YOUTUBE?

If video is hosted on a normal – non-streaming – server, it will require bandwidth from the network; if you and your collegues are busy, video playback can suffer – particularly if you have concurrent viewers. The converse is true – video usage will make large bandwidth demands of a normal – non-streaming – server, and your connectivity will suffer.

To answer the original question – we encode to .flv at 500 – 750 kbps, size on our site is 480×270 for 16×9 videos. Our streaming server automatically detect user’s bandwidth and serves them the video playing at optimised bit rate.

Hope that helps.

The Guardian has a special report on the future of online video advertising. “The media agency, MPG, estimates UK online video ad spend was £40m in 2009 with that figure set to rise to at least £60m this year.”