Yes your allowed!

Doing the handbrake method is really great because the file size is greatly reduced without too much compromising the video footage.

If your clients are just downloading and not playing the video online (i.e. they will download it and play it on there VLC or windows player), and you want to maintain the best quality, then render it out to M2T...but the file size might be too large and downloading might take a long time depending on how long your footage is.

I would just stick with mpeg-2, leave it as 1080, and take the default bit rate...of course there are many other good ways.

You may have to experiment a small clip and see if the handbrake method is acceptable to you. (might not be if they play it on a 53" tv screen).

Hope that helps a little.

Yes you're correct, downloading to their hard drive after purchasing and then watching with some media player. There's going to be videos and other files like PDF, etc, I guess everything organized into folders and then zipped up into one big file.

MPEG2 can't be a good choice; isn't that for DVD? These videos are not going to DVD.

I wasn't thinking of going full HD for the final product; it seems overkill to me.

MikeLv: There are a thousand ways to offer downloadable product with video. What you want to do first is an audience analysis and I do mean a thorough effort at that.

Questions to ask: Do ALL of your customers have the same latest version OS and uptodate systems? Mac and Windows? Are ALL of your customers willing to allow for a download of a 10Meg file (4min.) or even 25Meg file (12 min.)? Very few customers are willing to do any download at all, unless it is in their best interest - so be aware - you should offer lots of incentive with streaming preview, benefit sells, etc.

One thing that works across platform OS's is offering a mutli-media file in .pdf format which becomes a container for a short video sequence. Usually this is done with Quicktime .mov containers inside the .pdf document. Advantage? - example showing a catalogue of fashion clothing with text about the details of the product and an accompanying fashion model video with this item listing-- walking the runway showing the item as very attractive and wearable.

"MPEG2 can't be a good choice; isn't that for DVD?"

That's what DVDs use, that doesn't mean it cannot be used for other things. In fact it is, a lot of cameras record mpeg-2.

Still mpeg-2 isn't the most efficient codec by todays standards, I'd go for one of the H.264 codecs, they seem to play on anything however be warned, clients with really old PCs may not have enough power to play it back smoothly.


"I wasn't thinking of going full HD for the final product; it seems overkill to me"

1280x720 (720p) is probably more than enough, in fact depending on the content too much. Do some tests.

Bob.

As we all know, we can't accommodate everyone's computer and operating system, that would be next to impossible. These videos are actually much longer timewise and what I'm thinking about doing is having some sort of account area where customers can download the files as they need them instead of downloading one huge file. For example, one product will contain 24 videos, each being half an hour in length so that's 12 hours of video. So depending on the bitrate, this could be rather large.