As with sound, the safest opion ( but not the most attractive) is to make a cross platform/cross browser compatiable video file available. With sound we achieve this by going to a low quality common denominator. With video by making the video file an external download.
A "img src="video.gif" tag links the reader to an external download. In the example below I've linked to a 2.2 meg MTV clip. The tag is simply open tag, a href="whatever the video sorce is" close tag, the link text and the end tag.
The Netscape LiveVideo plug-in which runs AVI format movies only works on Windows machines. The same is true on Explorer- no Live Video plug-in for Mac. We're all waiting for the innovative pornography industry to share their knowledge with the rest of us, as they have not just video but self expanding streaming video running successfully on all browsers and O/S.
Real playerbegan as an audio player only but quickly extended to also work with video and animation. Windows media player is widely distributed because it comes onto millions of desktop computer as part of the Windows package QuickTime was the first video format for computers but took a long time to become a streaming technology (It had been downloaded 100 million times before it became streaming technology. It should be noted that both Media player and QuickTime work across the PC/MAC dimension.
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