I am planning to make short (3-5 min) videos with audio, of the facial of a speaker and I wonder if I should follow certain rules if I want those videos to be easily accessible to a majority of visitors to a web site, presumably visitors that have basic machines.
Most PCs have onboard speaker, is there special considerations to allow visitors to use that speaker to listen to these videos? Is that speaker generally of a suitable quality to listen to a speech lasting 3-5 minutes and understand what is said without getting a headache?
Or should we recommend the purchase and use of "headphones"? Any other tip most welcome.

Thank you for your help.

Rules?

Like keeping the overall bitrate and resolution low enough for average / basic machines to play them? Like normalizing the audio to -6dB? Like filtering (highpass/lowpass) the audio so it mostly contains frequencies capable of being reproduced by the speakers? 40Hz - 16kHz is probably appropriate for many speakers / headphones. Otherwise I'm not sure what you're getting at.

1 members found this post helpful.

Shadow_7
Thank you for your answer, it is perfect and precisely what I need to learn, I would not have had any clue about these aspects. I should have mentioned in my question that I need to learn everything on the subject. Following your answer, I conclude it is mainly a matter of experimenting the parameters you describe on a basic machine like a cheap laptop (I have one) and see what the result is and then safely assume that that is what the majority of visitors who have basic machines will see. If correct, this would solve a big chunk of what I need to learn and simplifies my problem a lot.

One of the remaining question I have is mainly about statistics: is it advisable to have different quality videos in the event that there would be a substantial proportion of visitors using a better quality machine (like "gamers") and the better quality video would make a marked difference in the ease of viewing and listening? This would probably be on the assumption (correct or not) that making a second and better quality product would only involve minimal modifications of the lower quality product, having a recording that can be used for both.

One question I have that is probably very basic but that many visitors may have is the fact that when there is a video appearing on my screen after I visited a web site (regardless of the machine used), I have never had one with sound when it is obvious that the video is a speaker saying something. Is an onboard speaker generally disabled by default or disabled depending on OS installation options or is there something else I missed? This has never been important enough for me to justify investigating.

I highly recommend the .webm format. It has been made quite popular by Youtube, so most people should probably be able to play it with minimal effort.

Not sure if it's worth making different quality videos; it probably is worth at least doing an HD version (720p) for people with good specs, and a standard definition version (720x480 or so) for lower specs. You may even want to release just the audio; if the video is only of the face, it sounds like the video isn't totally necessary to get the information across.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'm not going to answer this question but I will say that if you want me to watch your videos the need to be 1080, need to be able to go full screen, and they need to be able to be watched on both my Mac and Linux boxes. If one of these doesn't apply I'd just rather read about it

1 members found this post helpful.

You could download a youtube video and avprobe / ffprobe it to see what it uses. And yes multiple quality versions are a nice thing to have. Many people have bad internet and bandwidth caps. If a video is mostly audio, no need to download the 4k version to listen to it. Especially if it's a 10 minute video that would otherwise take 4 hours to download.

As far as audio, if a user needs it they'll have it. We've come a long way from the dumb terminals of old that could only beep. If you're worried about it, just add subtitles.

1 members found this post helpful.

Guess you could give the end use some choice of formats. ??

1 members found this post helpful.

Recommended Youtube settings are published by Google: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

Google has invested a lot of work in x264, x265, and webm, so they may be the ones to go with.

1 members found this post helpful.