OT: SWF publishing an MP4

TeetimeNC wrote on 7/22/2010, 5:18 AM
I am posting this here because there are a lot of helpful and smart people here, and I suspect many of you also have Flash experience.

I am using a 3rd party tool that creates "Flash" video by producing an MP4 AND a SWF. I believe this is referred to as "SWF publishing an MP4" but I may be mistaken on this. At any rate, the SWF is tiny, and I believe its purpose is to wrap the MP4 with a flash player interface.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with this and I hope someone here can help me understand it, and maybe even resolve it. This short MP4 has quite a bit of text in it and it looks quite acceptable when played as a standalone clip using either the Quicktime player or VLS. However, if I play the SWF (which plays the MP4) using the browser's Adobe Flash Player 10 the video is very much degraded. The text has very jagged edges and the whole thing is a bit of a mess.

Interestingly, I can upload the MP4 to Smugmug, and when they do their conversion to SWF it looks fine.

I intend to have this short MP4 looping on my Website's home page so I need to figure out a way to convert this to Flash and retain its quality. This will probably be a one-time or occasional need so I'm hoping to find a solution that is low-cost or free.

So, my questions are:

1. What would be causing the publishing SWF to degrade the quality of the published MP4?

2. Can anyone suggest another way to produce a SWF from my MP4 that maintains quality and is affordable?

/jerry

Comments

dlion wrote on 7/22/2010, 6:08 AM
try using the JW Player to launch the mp4 file directly. you really don't need the swf anymore.

all the clips on my site are set up this way. http://wacru.com
TeetimeNC wrote on 7/22/2010, 6:51 AM
dlion, thanks for the suggestion. I would have to come up with a place to host JW Player as I can't host it on SmugMug where I want to show this video. I did find another SmugMug user who is using JW Player hosted on his own site. He loaded his mp4 to SM, then created an RSS feed to his JW Player and embedded the player stream back in SM. Kinda convoluted but it worked.

With JW Player can I have it autostart and loop continously without displaying any player controls? This is a requirement and I am able to do this with the SWF.

Any ideas why the SWF is degrading the quailty of my mp4?

/jerry