Comparing Quicktime Flash9 and Youtube

When preparing video content for the internet there are 2 key factors to bear in mind.
1.The quality of the video for the end user
2 Accessibility of the video for the end user

So how do you get the best quality while trying to reach as broad a market as possible?
My answer is to encode in Quicktime using Apple’s excellent h264 encoder for quality and then to embed and publish in Flash to reach as many viewers as possible.

This is a clip for a documentary I made which has been encoded and embedded in Quickitime. Note the high quality of the video and the comparison in the zoom out scene in particular between this and other versions.

This is the same clip which has been encoded in Quicktime and embedded in Flash 9

This is the Youtube version which was originally encoded in Quicktime and trans-encoded by Youtube unsing Flash
What I really like about Youtube is its potential to distribute your video to a wide audience and subsequent marketing potential for your video content. Google have now brought out Video Sitemaps which has enormous potential in my opinion and I will be giving feedback very soon on how it has worked for us.

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