Standard Video Sizes
Hunting around for an answer to “what size should our videos be?” I found that there isn’t really a “standard” size for web based content. It, of course, largely depends on the target audience and the video subject, but I did find a good list of popular video sizes. These sizes appear to be dictated by popular, modern phone recording dimensions. Most videos are likely to be 16:9 or 4:3 ratio and when converting them for web display should be divisible by 16 to make it less likely for a device to have to do any extra work to render it. Don’t forget that video does not scale up well either!
16:9 - HD (High Definition)
1280 x 720 – (iPad compat.)
512 x 288 – (iPhone/iPod Touch compat.)
256 x 133 – (This is HD for really poor bandwidth connections of less than 1mbps)
4:3 SD ( Standard Definition)
1024 x 768 – (iPad compat.)
640 x 480 – (iPhone/iPod Touch compat)
320 x 240 – (This is SD for really poor bandwidth connections of less than 1mbps)
Things to also be aware of:
Some platforms like Apple’s iPad/iPhone/iPod require special encoding settings.
Some analogue formats such as NTSC/DV pixel formats do not scale directly to 4:3 and as such should be scaled non-uniformly to 640x480/320x240.
A list of common (and some not so common) device capabilities can be found here.
