Alternatives to Flip Video recorders?

[mrjohn]

I'm working on a real estate site that uses video as a marketing tool for a client.

They want a simple, cheap camera that we can give everyone to make the videos. Their first proposal was to use Flip Video. It's a great system from a point, shoot, get results standpoint.

The downer is that the Flip Video recorders are a freakin tech support nightmare waiting to happen. Simply put, the files are too big and fail to convert too often. And the end users are braindead. Asking them to change a few settings or convert the file on their PC is out of the question.

Are there any friendlier alternatives than Flip Video? I'd prefer something that output to a DVIX format or something similar.

 

[lee101]

Don't they output H.264 video with AAC audio, mp4 format, pretty standard? Should be able to integrate that on the web straight away with HTML5 <video> attribute or a basic flash player. The HD files are going to be pretty good, but will be as small as you can get for the given quality - generally better than DivX in my experience.

If you've looking at converting the files have you tried HandBrake, it does a good job of converting pretty much anything.

I wouldn't recommend DivX as thats pretty unsupported as far as the web is concerned, and the only recorders I've ever seen that support it are the cheap no-name ones which probably are nowhere near as good in terms of video quality.