NOTICE: I am officially recanting any endorsement for Easy HTML5 Video. Read the comments below to find out how bad they are at licensing and customer service. For now, let’s stick with Miro or our own ffmpeg scripts.
I recently discovered an app which takes input video in various formats and encodes all of the necessary formats for cross-browser, cross-platform HTML5 video embedding. It even outputs the tags for you. It’s called, appropriately, Easy HTML5 Video.
While I will probably continue to use my homebrew script for this, I wanted to mention it for anyone not really digging the command line approach. The lack of an app that could do an all-in-one batch encode for HTML5 video was what inspired my script in the first place. Easy HTML5 Video keeps things very, very simple. No quality adjustments or ffmpeg flags, just an output size setting and the option to publish the final videos to an FTP server.
Easy HTML5 Video is a cross-platform Java app. It’s not terribly pretty, but it works and the quality of output looks great on my tests. The free version puts a small logo on the output. It’s relatively unobtrusive, but if you want to remove it or replace it with your own logo, you’ll need to license the app: $49 for a single-website license, $69 for an unlimited license.
If you’re working with video these days, you need to be working with HTML5 formats. This makes it drop-dead easy.
Addendum: As Joe Workman pointed out on Twitter, I should probably mention Miro as a very flexible and free HTML5 video converter. However, the problem that Easy HTML5 Video solves for me is not flexibility or just the ability to handle the necessary formats, it’s the ability to drop one file in and automatically get out everything I need without manually setting up each format. Automation.
