Testing video pages is critical if you want to have a successful launch. You should be sure to test your page in the most popular browsers and versions for your website. I've found that while it's possible to use tools like Browserlab and AnyBrowser to test video, it's not as reliable as bringing up the page on a browser yourself. When you do that you can really see if it's working or not.
Since you went to all the trouble to encode your video in three formats, you should test it to make sure it displays in all three. This means, at a minimum, you should test it in:
- Firefox 3.5
- Safari 3 or 4
- Internet Explorer 7 or 8
You can test in Chrome, but since Chrome will view all three methods (even Flash, if you have the plugin), it's hard to tell if there's a problem with one of the other two or which codec Chrome is using.
For your peace of mind you should also test in older browsers to see what they do, especially if a lot of your readers use older browsers.
Getting the Video Working In Older Browsers
As with any Web page, you should first consider how important it is to get those browsers working. If 90% of your customers use Netscape, then you should have a fallback plan for them. But if less than 1% do, it might not matter so much. Once you've decided what browsers you're going to try to support, the easiest way is to simply create an alternate page for them to view the video in. On that alternate page you would embed a video using HTML 4. And then either use some form of browser detection to redirect them there or just add a link to that page on this one.
