To accommodate for some of the confusion still surrounding HTML5 video formats you, as a developer, will need to allow for a number of different platforms in order to ensure that support is kept as wide as possible, as shown in the following table:
Data is correct as at April 2012 with http://www.longtailvideo.com/html5 as the source.
The net result is that you will need to cater for several formats for video—the main ones now are WebM and MP4; you can also convert to Ogg Vorbis format, although this format is not so widely used.
Note
Please note that all of the tasks in this book are based on using Windows as the author's preferred platform—wherever possible, suggestions for equivalents on the Apple Mac platform are provided.
In this chapter, we're going to begin with converting your video masterpiece into a format suitable for use with HTML5 video.