I hope this is in the right place.

The company I work for sends regular approvals to a major client over the course of the year. The approval videos are wmv's. why? well we export them from the computer, upload them to Amazon S3 (using Cloudberry) which is like putting them on an ftp and then we send the link to the client. The client is NOT tech savy. They understand clicking the link, having windows media player open, and the video playing.

The issue is that they hate the quality of the draft or approval video. Even though the final video is perfect, they find fault with it because of the poor format/codec.

We'd love to use an avi or move and even the h.264 codec. Then we'd have a high quality file at a small size.

What are others doing besides building a webpage and putting a player up?

I am using Vimeo. Excellent quality, can protect video by password, 60$/year.

Jean-Philippe Archibald,

Thanks fro the input. I would personally love to do that but my boss wants everything to be faster than uploading and processing it.

We just export, upload and email a link right now. It's painless and quick. And the downtime is faster than the vimeo servers. It seems that there may be a solution by using a flash player and a directory to point the player to. Still looking and still open for others current solutions.

Vimeo Plus is pretty darned quick. And the quality is excellent. I've been using it for about 2 years now for client approval and have loved it. Another benefit is that it plays perfectly on iPads and iPhones (and other smartphones).

WMV? Welcome to 1995. :)

And if you want to use wmvs, do what I do. I upload wmv files in a 720P format to my Vimeo Plus account. The image quality stays the same (they are not reencoded, just rewrapped by Vimeo).

Then I email the client a link to the file on Vimeo. If I password protect the file, I can email them the password. All the client has to do is click the link in the email. The client doesn't have to be the least bit tech-savvy. For $60 dollars a year, a Vimeo Plus account is a real bargain for a small business owner.

I too am a Vimeo Plus user, and use that for Client Approval, same as people above.
In other work I've been able to use Adobe CS Review. This has *just* been extended to Premiere, and it's going to be a godsend. There's a blog about it here:
Using Adobe CS Review to Get Client Feedback (http://desktoppub.about.com/b/2010/09/09/using-adobe-cs-review-to-get-client-feedback.htm)
and info from Adobe here:
https://acrobat.com/csrlive_learnmore.html

When I was the 'client' once a 3D animation company based in Hong Kong would zip full res files and send it via an internet sharing site like You send it, frog (or something like that), etc. This keeps it secret and in the quality and format that you want your clients to see.

Not sure why are you implying that WMV is poor quality.

In fact it provides excellent quality at small file size on Windows.

Just make sure your encoding settings are good, including bandwidth you encode for. 720p at 6Mps will look fantastic.