How Do You Put Video on Your Website?
If you want to embed a video directly onto your own page, the most basic way to save the video as a quicktime file optimized for the web — preferably using the H264 codec. If you haven't done this before, it's a good idea to go through the process a few times using different video-viewer sizes and different quality levels and testing the result out for file-size at the end. Some videos, especially those with very little movement in the frame, can be saved at lower quality than others and still look good. Your aim should be to get a quality level that ensures that your video is worth watching while hopefully avoiding huge file size. The saving process gives you options for adjusting the quality of image and audio separately.
A preferable way to embed video, if you have the expertise, is to convert your video to a .flv file and then play that through a Flash player (which can be custom-designed to go with your site). This allows your video to stream in real time and saves your visitors a long wait, even for longer videos. There are many media encoders available for converting the format of your original video file but the one I recommend far above all others (for getting good quality video output at small file size) is Adobe Media Encoder.
There are a couple of issues to which you should pay attention if you are serving your videos off your own website: (i) you are reliant on the flow of visitors your site already gets for your audience and (ii) should your videos become popular, you will end up paying for all the bandwidth used by people viewing it.
If you want to use YouTube or Vimeo or Google Video to reach a wider audience and protect yourself from bandwidth overages, these websites make uploading to their websites extremely easy and when your video is uploaded you can simply click the "Embed" button and paste the code that generates into your own webpage. This easily:
In your browser, go "view > source" if you want to see how the above video is embedded (YouTube generates "embed" code for every video and you can just copy it into your webpage directly and the video will play).
YouTube has the reputation of being the site for mass entertainment; Vimeo holds the ground for more serious, artistic work. However, there are plenty of serious pieces on YouTube and their transcoder seems to save videos in a way that makes them a far easier watch than Vimeo (almost no "wait" time). You can upload videos to YouTube directly from these formats: Quicktime, Windows, .mov, .avi, .mpeg.
Compare: YouTube / Vimeo / Google Videos
If you have the budget and want to utilize video as part of a major business tool with player customization, monetization, video analytics (including tracking how much of any video your visitors watch before clicking out), mobile device support, live streaming, interactivity such as allowing your users to upload content, integration with seo, etc) then... contact me. There are many solutions for advanced use of video on the web and you want to be careful to use one that suits your needs and goals.