Best Flash Codecs

totally lost wrote on 8/17/2006, 11:29 AM
Whats the best path from HDV to flash? Can you down convert HDV directly down to flash? Would you get the same results downconverting from SD?

Whats the best Flash codec?

check out www.cnettv.com What do you guys think of this site. IMHO seems like a glimpse into the future.

Last but not least. If you encode in Flash and upload to www.youtube.com do they re-encode to Flash again at a lower bitrate or do they let you slide if you already have a .swf file?

Comments

MH_Stevens wrote on 8/17/2006, 4:06 PM
A standard way, and I think the best way and the way I do it is to render your HD to Quicktime movie and then import that into Flash8 or directly to your website with the Macromedia Flash8 Video encoder.
riredale wrote on 8/17/2006, 6:56 PM
Flash8 is showing up EVERYWHERE on the Internet. About the only sites that still are stuck on wmv are TV news networks. For some reason my PC chokes on those clips.

In my experience, the best codecs for Flash8 are the Macromedia Flash8 encoder and the Flix (On2) encoder. On2 is the company the makes the Flash8 encoder for Adobe/Macromedia.

Sorenson also makes a compression program using the On2 encoder.
deusx wrote on 8/18/2006, 4:41 AM
Render to uncompressed .avi or quicktime then you should use Sorenson or something like Flix to convert to flash video. With Sorenson you can either use Sorenson spark encoder or ON2. Personally I don't think one is better than the other at higher bit rates, but if you need to export at low bit rates then you'll get better quality with ON2.

I use 1k, so differences are minimal, file sizes almost the same either way, Sorenson Spark seems a little sharper with brighter colors, but slightly more artifacts, and I end up using that.

The reason to use one of those two over Flash 8 is 2 pass encoding. Codec included with Flash8 is only one pass.

Another advantage of Sorenson spark is , you are not imited to Flash8 player ( if you encode with ON2, your viewers must have flash8 installed ) , and there are still a lot of people out there with flash 7 or even flash 6 players.
logiquem wrote on 8/18/2006, 5:32 AM
I use QT format and Mpeg 4 codec at highest quality for intermediate codec (much better than Sorenson for me) . I render the file with the final flash frame rate and size so Flash FLV compression is fast and trouble free.