Happy Thanksgiving. As we gather with relatives to watch TV (the Thanksgiving Day Parade, your favorite football game) and to record home movies centered around a—hopefully—delicious turkey, I’d like to talk about mobile video and effective ways you can use the medium.

Newer versions of Flash enable you to add high quality video to an HTML page that members of your audience can watch even if they don’t have the most powerful computer equipment or the fastest internet connections. Examples in this posting include clips from a Godzilla inspired short video and a social issue documentary on immigrant teens.

The iPod’s screen is by no means large, but if you understand the basics of codecs and video compression, you can make video podcasts that look really sharp.

Simply shrinking a large frame of video to fit the display of a portable device, such as an iPod, just won’t work. They key is to shoot with your final output in mind.