What's a good video resolution for the web?

I am not a professional in the world of web design & development, but I do have an opinion that I think can shed some light onto the matter – which may help in your decision.

By todays standards, if you want to start a website – you in fact have to start two websites. A full page (filled with rich content vids/jpgs) version & its mobile counterpart. People are surfing the web on mobile devices more than ever & it’s on tiny screens – while the desktop user is surfing the net on monitors that used to be the size of common living room televisions not too long ago.

When on the iPod Touch, I find that I stray from video watching (as the screen is too small for my liking) & stick with text/jpg based information. On my desktop (27” monitor) I find that I always choose the highest resolution (usually 1080p) for videos – as anything below 720p does not look good & I have to zoom in & enlarge it, which only makes the video look grainy & washed out.

If it is possible, provide links to both hi-res & lo-res versions of your videos on your site. That way the mobile users can watch the video without having to wait for long load/buffer times & desktop users can enjoy the fullscreen HD version.

As for changing the resolution of videos – I’ve used Quicktime’s, ‘File’ – ‘Export’ feature to change resolutions of videos & find that they keep the quality of the video intact as much as I would want it to.

Hopefully I was able to provide a little bit of helpful information. Best of luck to you & your web site.

Rule of thumb is have your page width a size appropriate for your audience’s most likely equipment. The smallest width today would be 720 px for people with 800-pixel screens but these are getting rare as hen’s teeth except among a market likely to have aging equipment.
The typical minimum screen size today is more likely to be 1024 or 1280 wide
see optimum sizes here
Now you must decide whether you want to appeal to most people or everyone or even a select group—tech-savvy, trendy sites, wider pages than sites about sharing stories about cats or knitting patterns.

Wow, thanks for the insightful responses dudes. @rpmpseudonym: I’m glad you brought up video sizes for mobile devices, something I haven’t considered. @anartist: As far as resolution goes, I was talking resolution of the video within my pages, not necessarily the width of my website pages. That being said, my Web pages are 900px wide, would you approve of that width? As for the videos, I plan to keep their resolution at 640 X 480 or perhaps drop them down to the next popular resolution, or provide multiple resolutions (however the hell you go about doing that).

By the way, is it possible to have a video of 640×480 resolution, and play it in a video player of 320×240 resolution? Sorry for the long response, but this is an important subject for me. Thanks again for all the help dudes.