I was reading in the Australian newspaper today that Amazon fully expects Kindle e-book sales to overtake real book sales within 12 months. Already, there are authors whose electronic versions of paperbacks sell more than the paper ones. It seems this e-thing is here to stay. (For me, the jury is still out on newspapers though. Efforts to date have not impressed me).

But what of video? Yes it is true that even with a cheap camcorder (or digital camera), it is quite easy to produce a YouTube or Vimeo video that the world can then see. Even in pseudo high definition.

But what of other distribution methods?

The “video” versions of the Kindle include iPads, iPhones, laptops, Zune (don’t sneer) and goodness knows how many other types of player out there. And of course to get true hi-def in the best possible light, you’ll need Blu-ray. In reality you also need to shoot with a full HD compliant camera – what you have is most likely AVCHD based, sort of a “hi-def lite”.

And herein lies the problem.

Quite simply, while not too many people (in comparison) would want to write content for an e-book, being quite content with say WordPress or its ilk, it seems every man and his budgie want to make video. This means to get the best possible coverage, you need to learn about the mysterious “codec” and equally baffling “wrapper”.

Without going into depth here, there are plenty of tutorials around on these subjects (www.auscamonline.com might be a good starter), just for example, if a video file is supplied as an “AVI” format it does not necessarily follow it is for Windows only, just as a Quicktime file is not necessarily Mac alone. Quicktime and AVI are only “wrappers” containing information therein (that could be encoded in MPEG2 or MPEG4 or other codec).

A query today from a reader to a magazine asked why his hi-def file shot on a Samsung camera was MPEG 4 and wouldn’t play properly on his laptop but was fine on his big, shiny plasma TV direct from the camera. This is the sorts of confusion and misunderstanding there is in video-land. In short, he didn’t have the codec on his laptop, nor was the screen resolution of this older machine up to it.

Other culprits that aim to confuse include DivX, XVID and there are lots more to contend with.

Suffice to say, if you intend to go beyond simply uploading to YouTube to showcase your work, then it would be a good investment to understand this side of the business as well.