Are the properties (bitrate, fps) of my h.264 video OK for the web? I'm converting a Flash vector animation to an mp4 video for the web. After trying and failing with Swiffy, it's the only way I have of preserving the work "for posterity", once Flash is gone.

When exporting a FLA to MOV, the frame rate changes. For example, an 18 fps FLA comes out as 9.6 fps in the MOV (according to the QT player properties).

Because the animation is jittery, I used Handbrake to export the MOVs as h.264, with framerates of 24, 30 and 60. They look smoother. (I was surprised the time-length of the video doesn't change, I thought at higher framerates it'd speed up). 

Anyway, an mp4 produced like this has the following properties (according to the QT player):

Format: H.264, 550 x 250, millions, AAC, Mono, 48 kHz


FPS: 24.00
File size: 7.41 MB
Data rate: 202.25 kbit/sec
Length: 00:05:07.09


My newbie question is: can anyway tell me, at a glance, whether those properties are within the normal range for a video that is meant to be served from a dedicated web server or CDN?
Sure - it seems ok. However, it is also a good idea to offer other types of video for browsers that do not support mp4 / h264. The usual best practice involves supplying mp4, webm and ogg as containers. This site is a good reference.

A back of the napkin calculation:

1000 viewers / month @ 7.4 MB = 7.4 GB / Month.

Which is probably within the acceptable range for a generic server, just make sure the traffic allowed by your server provider can deal with it...

Assuming your server has a gigabit uplink (which is generally a bit more expensive), you could "theoretically" serve this video to 5000 users concurrently, however this won't work with normal apache servers - and it is probably a good idea to host the media files at amazon AWS (or whatever) if you are expecting that kind of traffic.