Most video hosting sites have terms of service or usage that are problematic for us.  For example there isn't a legal way to have a single "CHTC" YouTube account shared by multiple staff short of making a special arrangement with Google.

The good news is that there is no reason we can't just host the video ourselves!

The following is a general strategy; _as of May 2014 it has not been tested_.

{section: Downloads}

Put the files up for download!  There is no reason to not just offer for download the exact same files created for streaming (below).  Might be a symlink.

You might want to ensure the web server sets the Content-Disposition header so that it's downloaded and not viewed in browser.  {link: http://www.jtricks.com/bits/content_disposition.html promising looking summary of the technique}

{section: Streaming}

_{link: http://diveintohtml5.info/video.html#what-works Dive Into HTML5}_ has a good overview of what you need to do.  The situation is even better if you're willing to require a "recent" web browser (2011+), in which case you can ignore Flash and Theora+Vorbis+Ogg and exclusively rely on H.264(baseline)+AAC(low complexity)+MP4 and WebM.

_Dive Into HTML5's_ recommendations for creating the files should work, but are probably overkill.  If you've got a good ffmpeg install (Try /u/a/d/adesmet/bin/opt/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg ) it can do the job.  {link: https://superuser.com/questions/424015/what-bunch-of-ffmpeg-scripts-do-i-need-to-get-html5-compatible-video-for-everyb The full details are a bit long}, but here is a summary:

{code}
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx -qmax 42 -qmin 10 -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis -q:a 4 -f webm out.webm
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline  -movflags faststart -crf 23 -c:a libfdk_aac out.mp4
{endcode}

Warning: iPhones (as of 3S) can apparently only accept video up to 640x480. (Maybe? Double check.)  If this is true, we may want to also export low-resolution versions and have a link to a different place to view the videos for lower end devices.

(Instead of libfdk_aac, you can use libfaac. The original source did so. It appears that libfdk_aac is a superior replacement.)

Note that the above adds "-movflags faststart" to the mp4 creation. This causes a second pass on the file (slow, sadly) that moves the metadata to the start of the file, making it faster for a web browser to seek into the middle of the file.  Instead of "-movflags faststart" you can use the tool qt-faststart.

{section: Editing with ffmpeg}

This is probably unnecessary if you have a full blown video editor, but occasionally quick command line tools are useful.

{subsection: Lossless Trimming}

You can use ffmpeg to do lossless trimming of files (say, to break a single video into multiple videos, or to trim off dead time).  {link: http://askubuntu.com/questions/35605/splitting-an-mp4-file source }

{code}
# START and LENGTH are seconds or hh:mm:ss.
ffmpeg -acodec copy -vcodec copy -ss START -t LENGTH -i ORIGINALFILE.mp4 OUTFILE.mp4
{endcode}

{subsection: Cropping}

You can also crop the video with ffmpeg, which may be useful if part of the video feel is always empty (say, the video is wide enough to handle a 16:9 slide, but only 4:3 slides are shown.  This is lossy, so you'll probably want to merge it into the conversion step. {link: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/4563/how-can-i-crop-a-video-with-ffmpeg source}

{code}
ffmpeg -i ORIGINALFILE.mp4 -filter:v "crop=out_w:out_h:x:y" OUTFILE.mp4
{endcode}