For the purposes of this task, we're going to use one of the videos we converted from Task 1, so make sure you have this available.

In order to get the best results in the task to follow, you need to ensure that you use an HTML5 compatible browser. Also, you need to have a registered free account at YouTube and should have enrolled yourself in YouTube's HTML5 video trial at http://www.youtube.com/html5.

For the second part of this task, the only prerequisite to ensure optimal playback is that the video should be encoded to Ogg Theora format. This is to save bandwidth, although other formats can be used—VideoBin will automatically convert (or transcode) the videos on the fly. For the purposes of this task, I will assume you have used the video you converted in the previous task.

An alternative to using YouTube is to use another service, where licensing is not so restrictive; one such service is VideoBin, hosted at http://www.videobin.org. In this part of the task, we will look at how to upload and access content from this service.

YouTube has designed its upload process to be flexible and very easy to use. You can upload any of the HTML5 format videos (such as the ones we created from Task 1) as well as AVI, MPEG-PS, WMV, and FLV formats. When the file is uploaded, it is automatically transcoded into WebM format—this is effectively a free version of the VP8 format developed by On2 Technologies, which was subsequently bought out by Google in 2010.

At this stage, you will have a perfectly working video hosted on YouTube that is available for you to embed into your site in the normal manner.

However, if you go to Video Manager from within YouTube, you can edit the settings assigned to this video such as Privacy, Video thumbnail, allowing Comments and ratings, depending on your own preferences, as shown in the following screenshot. You can even set Google Maps to show where you recorded your video!

In the second part of this task, we looked at using VideoBin.org—a free hosting service with a less restrictive licensing arrangement than YouTube. Written using Python and Django, converting videos through VideoBin.org has been designed to be kept simple, so that you can concentrate on hosting your main content without the worry of the additional demand or overheads of running a video on your own server. You will then be able to style your video player as you wish, using styles that fit in with your site; we will see how to do this later in this book.

The key thing to bear in mind is the format used—while the upload process is deliberately kept simple, you will notice a delay if the chosen video is not already using the Ogg Vorbis format. All uploaded videos are transcoded from their original format to Ogg Vorbis using ffmpeg2theora as part of the process.

In the next section, we will take a look at how to style your own video player, so that you can use your own styles that will fit in with your site's appearance.

Up until now, we've concentrated on preparing our video for use with the HTML5 video tags. Let us now turn our attention to how you can embed videos into your pages looking at the following sections: