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Free eBooks - General web design , accessibility, usability, and CSS and (X)HTML
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Google Tools

± Useful Utilities

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Javascript
- noscript - when javascript is not enabled
Perl/CGI
PHP
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± Advanced Programming

Accepting Credit Cards
Microsoft Vista Cookies
FavIcon - The icon beside the title in the browser
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.htaccess - custom error messages and protect folders with passwords
Icons
Regular Expressions - Regx - used for search and replace in PHP and Perl
SSI Server Side Includes
Web Development

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Microsoft Office Alternatives - alternatives to purchasing Microsoft Office
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Web Design

NOTE: This is a collection of information and links collected over the years that might provide useful information. A Safer Company LLC does not guarantee, endorse or approve any of these links or their scripts. Use these links to other websites at your own risk.

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Video - Players

There are many free video players available. Unless you have a good reason to purchase a video player, I'd recommend using one of the standard players.

Wikipedia - List_of_media_players - Great information about players and operating system requied.

Player	Container	Supported Codecs
Flash Player 10 H.264 video codec (usually in .mp4 or .mov files)	.mp4 - best choice .mov	H.264 video codec VP6 codec (.flv files) - slightly older and used in Flash Player 9 offers excellent video quality
Quicktime Player includes iTunes	mp4 mov	H.264
Windows Media Player not available for Macs	.wmv files	VC-1 video codec
Real Player
Microsoft Silverlight 1	.wmv files	VC-1 video codec
Adobe® Flash® Player - a cross-platform, browser-based application runtime that provides uncompromised viewing of expressive applications, content, and videos across browsers and operating systems. Flash Player 10.3 delivers beautiful HD video, faster graphics rendering, and high performance on mobile devices and personal computers and is designed to take advantage of native device capabilities — enabling richer, more immersive user experiences. Optimize Flash content for mobile browsers
ALLPlayer.org

Codecs

H.264 video and AAC audio format are the best codecs for compressing your video.

H.264 Video

With the introduction of codecs like VC-1 and H.264, DVD-quality online video is readily achievable.

H.264 is the main video format.
- supported by MP4 and MOV container, MP4 is the better option since the complexity of the MOV container sometimes makes devices choke on a video.
- a next-generation video compression format known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding).
- developed for high definition systems such as HDTV, Blu-ray and HD DVD
- developed for low resolution portable devices such as the iPod, iPhone, PlayStation portable or Nokia N-series smart phones
- offers better quality at lower file sizes than both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4
- Apple adopted H.264 as the format for QuickTime.
- supported by both high definition DVD standards
- destined to be the future standard format for Blu-ray
- supported by just about any player, browser, plugin and device
VC-1 video codec
- Microsoft
FLV format
- still widely used
- only the Flash plugin can display it so FLV is not a good option
- some mobile devices like the iPhone do not support Flash
HTML5 browser standard
- can play H264, not FLV
OGG format
- not as widely used as H264/AAC
- open source and patent-free.
- Firefox and Opera only support OGG video. They also support the Flash plugin, which supports H264
AVI format
- not suited for websites
- widely used for distributing ripped movies or TV shows
- can only be played back in desktop players like VLC or Quicktime with Perian
Sorenson Spark codec
- older
- used for .flv files on YouTube
- found in most freeware/shareware software that encodes FLV
- quality is greatly inferior to the newer-generation codecs like H.264, VC-1 and VP-6

Compression Software

Online services offer better solutions and lower prices for compression.

hosted - upload videos manually or through an API
install on your own web servers
Note: many freeware/shareware encoding tools offer outdated codecs with poor file-size-to-quality performance metrics. Sorenson Spark .flv and WMV7 .wmv, for instance.) Below is a list of suggested compression and encoding software used by members of the LongTail community.

Online Services

These online services offer excellent quality, input support and a free trial:

Hey!Watch ($0.20 per video)
Encoding.com ($2.00 per GB)
Bits on the Run -free 1GB trial

There's also still a bunch of excellent desktop tools out there, but the good ones are generally quite expensive:

Sorenson Squeeze ($499)
Apple Compressor (part of Final Cut Studio - $999)

Freeware / shareware desktop encoders

Handbrake
- good free tool to convert just about any file to MP4 (H264/AAC) - originally built for ripping DVD's
- an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Source Material

Mobile phone cameras deliver already-compressed video. Use the highest-quality recording mode on your device when possible, then compress the file.

Compression Settings

HD is available online
- too demanding for both the average internet connection and the average CPU
- when publishing a HD video (1280 by 720 pixels), make sure you always publish a second version (320 or 480 wide) for slower computer and lower broadband connection.
- Our JW Player has a nice interface for this in the form of the HD Plugin. You can even enhance this further by encoding 2, 3 or 4 videos in different dimensions and letting the videoplayer automatically pick the best fitting video for each visitor. This mechanism is called bitrate switching. Both our JW Player and Bits on the Run support this out of the box.

For compressing your video, choose a bitrates (bits per second) with both the size of the output and quality of the input file in mind. Whenever possible, use two-pass encoding; it will take longer to encode, but the file will look better. Here's a rough overview of what bitrates to use at various screen sizes:

Output size	Bitrate	Filesize
320x240 pixels	400 kbps	3MB / minute
480x360 pixels	700 kbps	5MB / minute
720x540 pixels	1000 kbps	7.5MB / minute

If you are able to set key frame intervals in your compression software, Flash can only scrub to these key frames. So if you compress a movie with very few key frames, a user can only scrub to a few points inside your video. You can always compress with more key frames, you will end up with larger file sizes—it’s a tradeoff.

For audio, bit rates from 96 kbps to 164 kbps are usually fine. Test a few different bit rates to see if the sound looses any crispness.

Note that an FFMPEG encoder (and all software that builds upon it) has a huge range of settings for tweaking conversions. This may be overwhelming at first but these guides should help get you started.

Presets and Settings

Most compression tools offer excellent presets for encoding video to MP4 with H264 video and AAC audio. Look for a setting named like MP4 normal , H264 regular or MP4 good quality. This will probably already encode your videos to excellent quality. If you can set the width of the resulting video, make it 480, 640 or 720 pixels wide.

In case you want to tweak your encoding, here's a breakdown of the important settings:

bitrate: the bitrate defines how much bits (1/8 byte) one second of video will use. A video of 1 minute with a bitrate of 1000 kbps will be 7.5 MB large (1 / 8 * 60). Choose a bitrate ranging from 400kbps (with a width of 320) to 2000 kbps (with a width of 1280). If the compression tool offers a quality settings as well, this is preferred over setting a bitrate. Audio bitrates should be in the range of 64 (poor) to 192 kbps (perfect).
codec: with both MP4 and MOV, it is possible to choose multiple video codecs. Always use H.264 though, since that offers the best quality. Always use AAC as the audio codec.
deinterlacing: this should only be checked if your source video is interlaced. Tape-based DV cameras (and the ones that have an "i" in their name) usually produce interlaced footage. Without deinterlacing, movements in the video will get stripe artefacts.
height: A height of 270, 360 or 400 pixels is common today. Youtube-quality videos generally are 240 pixels high, HD video is 720px high.
quality: H.264 video can sometimes be encoded using a quality parameter instead of a bitrate. This usually results in lower files at the same bitrates, since the encoder will use less data if the frame is low on movement. A good quality is between 50% and 60% (or 25 to 20 RF).
two-pass: Videos can be encoded in one sweep (single pass), but some tools can also encode videos in two passes. In the first pass, the video is analyzed to see which sections require a higher or a lower bitrate. In the second pass, the actual encoding is done. Two-pass encoding takes longer but creates better videos: roughly 75% to 95% of the original filesize at the same quality.
width: A width of 480, 640 or 720 pixels is common today. Youtube-quality videos generally are 320 pixels wide, HD video is 1280px wide.

There are a lot of articles online that explain the more advanced encoding settings in detail. This overview from Ken Stone is excellent. Though he uses Apple's Compressor, the settings he explains are also found in other tools.