What is the Best Video File Format for Web Page?

Video speaks louder than words. Putting a well-designed video on the website properly can make your content more straightforward and easy to understand. As a website developer, you know how important it is to add the best format video content on a website for smooth playback without stuttery. You don't want to lose any subscriptions or sales opportunities due to format issues.

So what is the best format to choose for your website? There is no one-fit-all format due to the restriction in the compatibility of video formats and different requirements in quality and compression ratio.

Video File Compatibility: Different video formats are limitedly supported by different browsers. No one format can play on all browsers flawlessly without reaching out to a third-party plugin. Besides, end-play devices also have limited support for different video formats. To take Flash video as an example, it goes compatible with most of the browsers, but won't play on iOS devices.

Compression Ratio and Quality: We all favor lossless quality, and the smallest size. However, video recorded in a lower compression ratio format often comes with crisper quality and larger size. Suppose the bandwidth available to your users is limited, 300kps or even less, for instance, then it would take forever to play a low compression ratio format video. The storage savings granted by a given high compression ratio codec is large but at the cost of quality. In a word, a higher compression ratio often refers to lower quality and vice versa. That's why the balance between compression ratio and quality is hard to make.

We will consider all these 3 factors to review the best formats for the web. Before that, we should figure out the difference between video container and codec format, so that you can process your video for the web with video converter software more easily.

What is Video Container Format?

Simply put, container format refers to a specific container that is used to store video information, such as audio, video subtitles, etc. It can be regarded as a bottle, while the real audio or video information is the drink in it. Some of the most frequently mentioned containers are MP4, AVI, and FLV, etc.

What is the Video Codec Format?

Codec format is a different concept from container format. It functions by compressing the original video file to a relatively smaller size by adopting some specific encode technology. H.264 and H.265 are two of the most popular coding formats that you may be familiar with.

It is a codec format that will influence the size and quality of your video. Thus, the video format we talk about here refers to codec format instead of container format.

What is the HTML5 Video?

Before HTML5, people have to reach out to a plugin like Flash Media Player to play videos on the web. But not all browser supports the Flash plugin. As a result, many of your videos may fail to reach target customers. HTML5 adopts the video element, with which web developers can add a video to a page in the same easy way as adding an image. People can play types of videos on the website without a third-party plugin. It is supported by a wider range of browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, etc. Better yet, the HTML5 video tag works with MP4, WebM, and Ogg videos. The specific browser support information can be found in the below table

What is the Best Format for Web?

H.264 (AVC) MP4

H.264, also known as AVC is for HD and SD videos. It currently is your top option as a web video compressed format, and mostly uses an MP4 container. It is used to encode Blue-ray discs and is supported by all most all devices that produced in the latest decades including iOS and Android devices, TVs, and game consoles. Browsers and stream media like IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and YouTube also support H.264.

In terms of quality and compression rate, it relies mainly on temporal compression and motion prediction to shrink the size. The compression ratio and output quality are highly dependent on the profile setting with H.264. The 3 mostly common seen profiles are the baseline, main and high profile. Among them, the high profile setting is best recommended as it can compress video at a ratio rate of 2000:1 with no sacrifice in quality. In sum, H.264 MP4, the NO.1 option, can play on almost all browsers with HTML 5 video tag.

H.265 (HEVC) MP4

H.265 refers to High-Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC. To easier and better understand H.265, we can compare it with H.264. It expands on the efficiencies of the H.264 compression standard and can encode video with superior quality but smaller size. From our test, we can view high-definition motion images encoded by H.265 in half of the bit rate requirement of H.264.

However, its licensing is very expensive and the encoding speed is slow as the browsers need to offload decoding tasks to the operation system, and then the operation system offloads that task to the hardware to playback this high complexity of format. Therefore only safari and partial of IE, Edge with hardware acceleration enabled can playback H.265 codec in HTML 5 video element.

Though H.265 is Incompatible with most browsers and devices, it can be your go-to option if you are uploading large 4K videos and most of your customers are iOS users.

VP9 WebM

VP9, developed by Google, is free and usually with mapping for Webm container. It has similar advantages to H.265 in the aspect of quality and size as it can reduce the bit rate of video transmissions by 50% while keeping a sharp quality. Suppose your bandwidth only allows you to stream videos in 360P previously, VP9 now enables you to playback 720p videos effortlessly. The encoding speed is a little slow but better than H.265 and the decoding efficiency is lower than that.

What makes VP9 win fewer website developers than H.264 is that it only goes compatible with Google. Apple users still need to turn to H.264 or H.265 for help. But suppose you have many Android users, VP9 still deserves a try.

AV1 - Possible the Best Format in the Future

AV1, known as Alliance for Open Media Video 1, is a royalty-free and open-source video compress format specially developed for the web. It is said to be the successor of VP9 and a formidable rival of HEVC with the capability to improve video efficiency by 30% or more than HEVC. YouTube, the largest video-sharing platform, has already established a test playlist for AV1 videos and claims to switch to AV1 once it is available.

How to Convert Video to the Best Web Format?

What to do if your video is shot with a web unfriendly format? To convert the source video to the best format for your website by a video converter can easily solve your problem.

Handbrake is an open-source video transcoder for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. It doesn't ask for a penny and provides you with many advanced settings of video parameters. That's nice for users who get some knowledge of video editing. However, it takes a steep learning curve for beginners to understand the difficult terminologies, find hidden settings, and get adapt to the out-of-date interface.

FFmpeg is another cross-platform solution to convert videos. It is very powerful and free. You are allowed to customize your videos in any way you want without quality loss. For many programmers, it works better even than many expensive paid converters. The drawback of that for many users is FFmpeg doesn't provide you with a common and straightforward interface like a normal app. You have to learn the basic code knowledge to convert your videos.