I'm adding video to a site for the first time. I was thinking that QT would probably be the most universal cross-platform format. Of course, the first person I asked to test it for me, (my mother-in-law - the last person I know who still has a dial-up connection), got an error message saying she didn't have it installed.

I'm a Mac user. Doesn't IE automatically install the QT plug? She may also have an older version of IE as well as Windows.

Second question, is IE pretty intolerant of spaces in file names? I had posted a .mov file for testing which I had carelessly not renamed to remove spaces and it wouldn't load in IE6. It's obviously an easy fix but I'm just curious.

Thanks - JAY

No, QuickTime isn't as much integrated on PC as it is on Mac. I'm a Mac user too, but I think PC's rather have Windows Media Player or RealPlayer installed. And I guess they should be able to view a .mov file.

It's always better not to use spaces in file names. Some servers might have problems with them. See (after a quick google search): http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/html_no6.htm.

On a Windows box QuickTime is installed with iTunes, or by itself, but not as part of most factory disk images.

There should be a prompt to install it if it's not already installed, but for a dialup user that could be a glacial download.

Flash is probably the most universally installed video plug-in available, but to deploy it is harder than just embedding a movie. You need some kind of Flash application to produce the flash movie.

If you need some QuickTime embedding pointers you could view my tutorial designed for someone who's never done this before.

Spaces in URL should be encoded as %20

All user agents should be able to deal with them then, although the URL won't be as pretty...

Flash is great and I have CS3, but it seems to me that there are lots more updates to deal with. For really inexperienced web users like my parents, those prompts just scare the h*ll out of them. Maybe it would be better in the long run. The updates are much smaller than a QT install, as you alluded to.

Thanks for your input.

You're saying those characters should be part of the file name rather than expecting the browser to add them? If so, yeah, that's ugly.

Thanks.

They should be part of the URL.

So if the file is called foo bar.html then the URL should be foo%20bar.html

I'm actually just linking them directly to the file, in this case.

If you're linking, then you're linking to a URL. The browser doesn't care whether it's a file on the server's filesystem.

flv is best for me.

Deep

Media Player yes, but not RealPlayer.

Yeah, well, thanks for the info. I'm on Mac, as you know ;-)