FYI: Flash 8 HD Playback! (well, sorta)

VOGuy wrote on 9/15/2005, 8:14 PM

Hi everyone.

Well I just succeeded in encoding Vegas-produced HDV video in Flash 8 Video, for your evaluation.

View here:
www.hd-tv.us

If you have a pretty fast Internet connection, (> 1500kbps, and the hosting provider keeps up) and a reasonably fast computer, you can view it in REAL TIME!

The video is one of the segments of my soon (?) to be completed "VoiceOver for HD" program, described here at

To get this to encode, I had to first render as uncompressed (Not sony YUV) (24P 1280x724) avi, then encode through the Flash 8 Video encoder. I set the Flash video data rate at 1400, and reduced the size to 1000x562. For the approx 50sec segment, encoding took about 30 minutes to generate the uncompressed .avi file, then about 25 minutes to encode the Flash file.

All things considered, I think it looks pretty good.

More experiments to come.

Travis
www.Announcing.biz

Oh, you need the new Flash 8 player to view this. It might not automatically install if you have ActiveX blocking turned on.

Comments

VOGuy wrote on 9/16/2005, 4:00 PM

For those of you with slower connections and smaller screens, here's another version:

www.hd-tv.us/smaller

Data Rate: 900kbps.
Res: 750x420

dat5150 wrote on 9/16/2005, 7:12 PM

Looks great!

riredale wrote on 9/17/2005, 6:19 PM

What is your impression of Flash 8 versus WMV for web streaming? Which method would give better quality for a given bitrate and image size?

VOGuy wrote on 9/17/2005, 7:19 PM

The folks at Macromedia seem to think it surpasses Windows Media, and even h.264. I've also read reports that there are still issues regarding usage rights/payment that haven't been worked out for h.264.

Windows Media does work, but it comes with the fact that it's Microsoft, (not well supported on non-MS operating systems) and might not be as effiecient as h.264 and Flash 8.

I don't think Flash 8 has any rights management options (a good or bad thing, depending on your application and point-of-view).

What Flash 8 does have going for it is that it will end up being installed on virtually all machines with an internet connection, if previous versions are a good example, and the video can be integreated into a Flash presentation. It is possible to "pre" download video while keeping the viewer busy with other things which require much less bandwidth.

Nat wrote on 9/17/2005, 8:16 PM

I encoded my last video in both Flash 8, WMV, Quicktime and Realmedia and Flash 8 has the better quality by far and is 8 megs smaller than the other files !!

See this link, in the first paragraph of the page :

http://infusionsystems.com/catalog/product_info.php/products_id/110