flv is dead.

you should be rendering to h264 mp4 and utilizing an html5 player with fallback accordingly. Most modern players now allow you to embed the h264 mp4 and will play back as an flv accordingly.

Well weird thing is FLV is all over the net. It's hard to tell it's dead when Youtube and others are using it.

Just about every video I encounter on the web is FLV. Am I wrong about that?

yes. do yourself a favor and take a look at the JW Player.

http://www.longtailvideo.com/players

encode to mp4 and embed a JW Player on a page. They have examples and lotsa help.

> "Well weird thing is FLV is all over the net. It's hard to tell it's dead when Youtube and others are using it."

I don't believe YouTube is using Flash anymore. They have moved on to AVC/H.264 (MPEG4). Yes, Flash was very popular and yes there is a lot of it still around but the last thing you should be doing is deploying more of it. You should be moving to the new standard which plays on everything.

> "Just about every video I encounter on the web is FLV. Am I wrong about that?"

I do almost all of my web surfing using my iPad and it doesn't support Flash and I very rarely encounter a video that I can't play so I would say that this is not so.

Even Adobe has officially declared that their Flash Player is dead for mobile devices. It's time to move on.

Here is what they said:

"Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices. However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers."

Since mobile devices are proliferating faster than desktops, you should stop using Flash if you want to capture this market.

~jr

Interesting, I just tried to make a detailed post with codeblocks about how use JW Player to play on virtually any device and got the following message:



The gist of the message was, I've had a work-in-progress that uses JW Player to sense the bandwidth of your connection and the properties of your browser (Flash, HTML5, etc.) to play an .mp4 on virtually any device. I haven't been able to thoroughly test it, as I don't have a cadre of devices. In any case, you can try it here: Snow Geese

I'm scared to re-list the codeblocks as I'll get those errors again. However, you can read about earlier efforts here: Playback Stutter in H264 FLV & Related Questions

...Jerry

Flash player has been able to play MP4 files for years now. It's far from dead. You don't need .flv, just render out an MP4 and it will play in any flash player or in that HTML5 joke they are currently pushing.

I do most of my web browsing on my iPad and Flash video doesn't work at all on that device. Use Flash and you are cutting out a large percentage of the possible viewers. More and more people are using tablets and phones to view Internet content, so your audience is getting progressively smaller if you are using Flash.

I'm just ignorant about how video codecs are used, I suspect.

When I go to youtube, and right click I get a Flash player menu. I assumed the video was flv.

But I like what Dues said, if MP4 is the way to go I'll head in that direction.

One little caveat if you're using it (Mp4) in your own website. Make sure you render youre Mp4 for progressive downloading. It is an option on the Mainconcept AVC in Vegas. The Sony AVC doesn't have this option, but you can find utilities that change the bit in the file for progressive downloading.

Where exactly is that "progressive downloading." option?

I picked the Mainconcept AVC and under the Custom button, I don't see any options...
thanks

"Where exactly is that "progressive downloading." option?"This was implemented in Vegas 11. If you're using earlier versions of Vegas, you can use a publicly available utility like MP4 FastStart or the "Web Optimize" option of HandBrake to accomplish the same function. Any of these options will modify the MOOV Atom on your mp4 render.


...Jerry

Small things like the "fast start" tab are why I want to be able to use V11 without it constantly crashing.

There are lots of codecs that can be used to compress the hell out of a raw video file. FLV burst onto the scene about 5 years ago because it offered pretty good compression and, just as importantly, could be played on pretty much any computer. This was because virtually all computers then had Adobe's (previously Macromedia's) "Flash" player installed. This was important--if you encoded in WMV (Microsoft) then you left out a lot of Apple PCs, if you encoded with Quicktime you left out a lot of MS-based PCs, if you encoded in Real you were an idiot. The Flash player did much more than just play videos--it allowed for the development of whizzy web pages. Just go to any major company website to see it in action.

More recently, the MPEG4/MP4/H.264 format (henceforth called "MP4") has become popular, primarily because it offers even better compression--about a factor of 2 better than the MPEG2 standard used in making DVD video. For several years now, Adobe has seen the handwriting on the wall and has updated their Flash product so that it, too, can play video encoded in the new MP4 format.

Flash is still very dominant on websites. Right-click on a Youtube video and you will see that a Flash player is most likely used. Last year a workaround was released which opens up Flash to Apple products also.

Adobe has announced that they are putting their future energies into a newer approach called "Air." This apparently incorporates Flash but also other methodologies to continue to provide a rich webpage environment across all platforms, including desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. But there is nothing wrong in continuing to put a Flash player (such as the JW one) on your webpages, or encoding in FLV, though MP4 is a much better codec at this point. The only downside to MP4 is that it takes more horsepower to decode, from what I can tell. Otherwise, it's pretty much universal also--Flash players from 2008 onwards can work with it.

I could be wrong on some of these comments, but I think this is where things are today.

"Right-click on a Youtube video and you will see that a Flash player is most likely used"

Flash Player, yes, but flash players play MP4 files just fine, and since YouTube hosts millions of videos, it only makes sense for YouTube to use the most compact format available.

When Google bought the VP8 codec as part of the On2 Technologies acquisition in 2010, the speculation was that YouTube videos would migrate to the VP8 codec to avoid any licensing fees to the Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) for using MP4.

"This was important--if you encoded in WMV (Microsoft) then you left out a lot of Apple PCs"

Well, I used to be a fan of Silverlight which would allow the user to play WMVs on most any non-tablet browser. Find a Mac with Safari and click here: http://www.jazzythedog.com/testing/Silverlight.aspx (you may be requested to install the Silverlight plugin, but it should work just fine). I've since "graduated" to the Vegas->DNxHD->HandBrake->h.264/mp4->JW Player solution.

"if you encoded in Real you were an idiot"

Truer words were never spoken [grin]

...Jerry

I have tried both the Sony AVC and MainConcept encoders in Studio HD 11 and the mp4s did not load progressively (would need to wait for complete file to download before it played). There were no visible settings or options in either encoder to set 'Web Optimized" or Progressive download.

I created a version using Handbrake with "web optimized" selected and the file played progressively in the same environment that the other encodes did not.

Jerry - I loved the Jazzy the Dog logo shot.
Instead of posting code, why not just put it into a dropbox folder and share that?
Just put it in a public folder in your Dropbox. I use Dropbox to make files available to others when posting files on a forum is just not reliable nor feasible.

Use this link (http://db.tt/KCWoOts) to get your free 2GB Dropbox and we both get an additional 500MB.

Just put the file into the /Public folder, right click on the file, and select Dropbox in the drop-down menu and click on "Copy Public Link". You can safely share that link with anyone.