HTML5 Video Format Best Practices

I am working on adding the ability to upload videos to a CMS that I am developing, and I am a little confused about the 'best practices' for uploading videos. The videos will be p

Solution 1:

MP4, (in detail h.264 compression and MP4 container) has a license / rights held by a private company, MPEG LA. That's why some of the browsers want to avoid depending on it. Although browsers are not likely to drop their existing support, license issues prevent developers to think browsers' support for MP4/h.264 will continue forever.

Google has announced that it would remove h.264 support from Chromium project in 2011 but Chrome still supports it.

Google's VP8 and VP9 (and WEBM container) has a free and open license. But due to competition, not all of the other browsers are willing to give support for VP8-9/WEBM. This may changing / improving in time. For example while none of the Internet Explorer versions had WEBM support, Edge does. Apparently, only Apply Safari in major browsers, lacks WEBM support.

MPEG LA in the meantime keep announcing that it will not charge for their formats use on the internet, this in reality does not make the h.264/MP4 format completely free.

So these make necessary for the sites provide video content to think carefully about their browser / format support. I believe at least an MP4 and a WEBM copy of every video should be created even if MP4 part of the content might be safe to be purged in a few years.

A conversion after upload is nearly a must. Video encoders and wrappers have tons of different parameters and if you accept the videos uploaded as they are, you may end up with a jungle.

Youtube does re-encode the videos and there are some evidences that they are using ffmpeg at least to do some of their tasks.