I tried some searches for videos, like 'people', 'background', 'abstract', 'globe', but never found more than 1 video, if at all. How many videos are there actually on Zymmtrival? Is it even worth uploading?

Ok,  I'll come back some time in the future, then. Thanks for the info!

Thanks, those are excellent suggestions. Disk space is not an issue but obviously like with the photos, we have to cap things off at a level that will deliver reasonable $ returns vs the electrons we're burnin' up.   

We have some frameworks for specs on what to accept already, but if you want to lay out your ideal vision of format/codec requirements that would satisfy buyers the most, please do continue!          

I've already caught a few tidbits about PAL vs NTSC sales performance here on MSG that are firsthand reports from the field - this type of info is invaluable, I personally don't feel like blowing a week wrestling with programming the site to accept some wacky format, that no one ends up buying anyhow. 

Most sites are now accepting H.264 because the compression is outstanding and the image quality is still great.  Prior to H.264, Photo JPEG was the standard and you should still accept it.

Sites that accept footage with embedded alpha have accepted the "Animation Codec" which does preserve the alpha channel, but files can get very large (I have a 20 second clip encoded with Animation that is just over 700 megabytes).  I think the primary reason that the PNG codec wasn 't support for alpha was many transcoders had problems creating the flash from it.  If your transcoder supports PNG, I highly recommend it because it supports Alpha and has better compression than Animation while still preserving quality.

JPEGA/B and MJPEG are outdated and personally I wouldn't bother with them, but people with older encoding software might complain.

As for PAL vs NTSC...  I don't see much PAL sales from sites that do not do effective marketing overseas.  If your primary marketing is in English, I don't see much PAL business.  But there are a couple of footage sites based in Europe which specialize in non-English languages and only sell PAL footage.  They do well from what I understand.  In the HD market, it doesn't really matter for the most part.   Which is why all of the companies that sell their own footage directly encode at 1920x1080@30fps or 60fps.  It's easily downsampled to 720p and SD in any format.

This info is gold, thank you.  Yes, I wouldn't want to be in charge of an Editorial policy where we try and determine if frame-grab thumbs are actually jazzed-up photoshops or straight grabs. Talk about a major manpower suck.  An online player with a frame-grab option would be ideal.      I've noted this in our issue tracker and hopefully we can whip this up.