if I set up the facility for people to embed video content on their site via their CMS (using TinyMCE editor), is there any reliable cross platform video format that should be used? From what I can find online, the only reliable way to embed and stream video is using FLV. Other formats seem to have caveats, e.g codecs required or quicktime updates required. Ideally I’d like to avoid this type of situation. If it is the case that FLV is the preferred option, then that involves asking people to encode their video content to FLV before uploading, so there is an extra step required here (unless I can set up the encoding in the back end, but this might take a while to process depending on the size of the video).
Does anyone have any additional advice on this? The types of video i’d imagine people will be working with is raw camera footage, so i need to figure out the easiest and most reliable way of getting the footage on to a web page.
Flash video, via sites like YouTube and Vimeo, is definitely the way to go. Users just need to upload videos to a site like that, and they can embed videos that way. Once you offload the hosting to a 3rd-party site, you don’t have to worry about any of the details beyond having Flash installed/enabled.