To accommodate for some of the confusion still surrounding HTML5 video formats you, as a developer, will need to allow for a number of different platforms in order to ensure that support is kept as wide as possible, as shown in the following table:

Data is correct as at April 2012 with http://www.longtailvideo.com/html5 as the source.

The net result is that you will need to cater for several formats for video—the main ones now are WebM and MP4; you can also convert to Ogg Vorbis format, although this format is not so widely used.

In this chapter, we're going to begin with converting your video masterpiece into a format suitable for use with HTML5 video.