Choosing the right format

So far, we've learnt that to work with the HTML5 <video> tags, we need to use either the WebM or MP4 formats (or ideally both, to ensure coverage). It's possible that you may have existing content that isn't in this format; if this is the case, let's look at how we can get it converted.

There are dozens of applications available for download, to convert from one format to another—my personal favorite is XMedia Recode for Windows, which is available at http://www.xmedia-recode.de. This allows conversion to and from a host of different formats, including both WebM and MP4. Let's take a look at how it works using the following steps:

1. We'll start by downloading a copy of XMedia Recode from http://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/download.html; the latest version is 3.1.9.4 at the time of this writing.

2. Double-click on the setup executable to launch installation and accept all defaults throughout the wizard.

   At this point, XMedia Recode will be installed; we now need to run...