Serving WMV on a drupal site?

I have a WMV file that I need to host on my drupal 6.13 site (on ubuntu 9.x). Is a there a relatively painless way to do this.

Do I need the "Video" module to do this? Or can I just install a video player and point my WMV file to it?

My other concern is the use开发者_StackOverflowr should be able to view this video on my site without needing to download anything, is WMV the appropriate format? I am worry about people viewing this on the mac and ios device. Should I convert this to another format first?

Can I do all of the above with free software alone?

Thank a lot.

The de-facto standard, especially if you want to target iOS devices, is H.264: WMV is not going to cut it. Most Flash-based players (which you'll need for browsers like IE and Firefox that do not support H.264) also support H.264 video.

From a site administration standpoint, you'll need to either prevent users from uploading non H.264 video, or transcode the files once uploaded. This is not a trivial task, and you should use a contributed module for this. Video is probably the most far along in providing a turnkey video hosting solution.

There is also Kaltura, but it's a commercial service and they have historically failed to address privacy issues despite repeated warnings. There's a new maintainer in charge of the module, independent of the company, and the module may be safer to use than in the past.