If you have ever tried to use free tools to make videos using things like Camstudio, Windows Movie Maker and many others you will sometimes encounter some issues. Windows has a good movie recorder in Windows Movie Maker and Windows Live Movie Maker. They record fine and can be edited fine. However, the format they produce when you have finished is normally an “avi” format. This format gives a good quality playback but is very large in size. This means you will have problems uploading to a website and getting it to play. In this format you will have to let someone download it to their computer to play.
To get a video to play on a website it has to be in format that works with a player such as JV player or flowplayer. These products are designed to take your video and play it in the website much as you would with a YouTube video. The can be fine tuned to show different features such as a playback bar and different colored backgrounds. You can also add your own pictures a the starting pint of the video which show when it is not playing. They work on WordPress blogs and on normal html/php web sites. The current main formats the videos need to be in are “flv” , “mp4” and “swf” . “Html 5” is also coming into play which will change this. Swf is also known as shockwave and when generated with the right tool can play on its own and be uploaded to a website as an all-inclusive package. The other formats can be uploaded as single files to work with Flowplayer or JV player.
For getting the videos into the right format you will need to use a file converter. Some tools include some basic conversions. The popular VLC product that plays back videos has the capability to convert files. It is a little more complex to do than just point and click but will work.
Another tool is Format Factory. For conversion this tool is very easy to use. You select what format you want the output to be in, select the file you want to convert, then press start. You can make more complex fine tuning with this tool such as the quality of the output , the size of the screen, sound quality, etc. The tool also has the capability to split or join files together.
There are many other similar tools that can be found using the search engines and these are all free to use. If you want to use a paid version Camtasia has the capability of outputting the files in a web friendly format but you will need to pay around $300 for it.