There are various video sharing services, like Youtube or Vimeo, in the web that can host and serve the files for us which is great.

However, there are cases that these services may not be a good fit like "unbranded videos", "custom sizes", a custom player, etc. This is when we usually need to convert/encode our videos to make them ready for the web.

And there are multiple formats like the popular FLV or HTML5 video formats like OGG, h.264 and WebM where you may need multiple versions of the same video for maximum compability.

Here are free video converter applications that support these formats to help you complete this process easily:

Miro Video Converter (Windows & Mac)

A very simple but powerful application to convert any video into MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora, or for Android, iPhone, and more.

Miro Video Converter is open source and has presets to convert videos into selected device with the right size + format.

Freemake (Windows)

Freemake is a feature-rich video converter that supports too many formats from avi, wmv, flv or swf to mp3, ogg, aac, wma and much more.

The program also has built-in video editing, photo slideshow creation and burning the outputs to DVD.

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Video JS is a JavaScript-based HTML5 video player that falls back to Flowplayer for unsupported browsers .

The player supports H.264, Theora OGG and the new Google-powered WebM formats.

It is lightweight, doesn't use any images and can be totally skinned with CSS.

Also, it does not depend on any JavaScript frameworks, has support for fullscreen and volume controls.

The popular web player JW Player now has a HTML5 version after its well-known Flash and Silverlight ones.

JW Player For HTML5 is a totally skinnable and configurable player based on the <video> tag of HTML5.

It is built with jQuery, and for any browser without HTML5 support, falls back to the JW Player for Flash automatically.

The player can be set to display a poster image before and/or after the video.

Also, it is possible to make it auto-play, auto-repeat, start with a pre-defined volume and much more.

Considering the player falls back to Flash, the formats supported are also the ones that can be played by Flash:

• H264 baseline video / AAC low-complexity audio in the MP4 or MOV container
• Theora video / Vorbis audio in the OGG container
• VP6 video / MP3 audio in the FLV container
• Spark (H263) video / MP3 audio in the FLV container

P.S. The player is currently in beta status, does not have all the features of JW players but works pretty stable.

With the rise of HTML5, formats like H.264 or OGG is being used much more everyday besides the well-known FLV (and yes, there is HD too).

In order to be compatible with every device and browser, you may need to serve multiple formats of the same video (like Youtube or Vimeo does).

And, with new videos being uploaded every minute, this can be a complex situation.

Panda is an online platform that enables you to convert videos into multiple formats in the cloud.

With a REST-based API, the platform not only helps encoding the videos, but the uploading process as well.

How Does It Work?

It is actually pretty simple and you can be up & going within hours (including the uploading and encoding of them).

1. create a form on your site which includes the provided Flash file upload component
2. user starts uploading the video (Panda displays a progress bar) and, once uploaded, it is added to the encoding queue
3. Panda submits you the ID of the video being encoded and puts it to your S3 bucket + updates you back when it is completed
4. That's it, you're ready to stream.

The platform offers ready to use codes for integration like a jQuery client uploader, PHP, Python libraries and a gem for Ruby.

Rather than pricing the service on a per-video basis, Panda provides you a dedicated cloud where you can encode an unlimited number of videos.

It is currently in public beta and free during this period. After that, a dedicated cloud of any size can be chosen depending on the processing power required.

P.S. This is a sponsored post.