Quote DeusX:

There is no point in shooting and editing something then showing it to people looking like some crap youtube video

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Sure, unless you happen to be the wildly successful website known as YouTube

If you don't care about quality, upload to youtube all you want.

We are not talking about the same thing here at all.
Paris Hilton is just as successful as youtube, am I supposed to be impressed? Or should I just conclude that we are outnumbered by morons, and pay no attention to the standars they want to set for me?

As I see it now the biggest drawback of Flash video is that it doesn't allow the user to save a copy locally on their machine (unless they dig in their internet cache and download an offline flv player). This is easier with WMP, Quicktime (Pro) and the DivX Web Player.

In some instances that might be an advantage but personally I prefer to allow viewers to save the file on their computer.

deusX, no need to get narky. I was merely making the point that there is no objective "minimum quality". What is crap to you may be exactly the appropriate target market to others.

Sorry, but I've got chime in here...

What I think deusx is saying, and I can't help but agree with him, is that just because the majority finds mediocrity acceptable, that doesn't mean we have to embrace it as the new standard.

>>deusX, no need to get narky. I was merely making the point that there is no objective "minimum quality". What is crap to you may be exactly the appropriate target market to others. <<<

I'm not, and I did say "for me" before describing those minumum standards. I am pretty anal about this kind of stuff. I wish there was a way for an MP3 file to check what kind of headphones the listener was using, and then refuse to play while flashing a message on screen: "your earbuds do not meet the minimum specs required for this song to play. Get a clue and buy some decent ones you cheap bastard".

If you are hosting a couple of million videos for free, you simply can't afford to throw a huge bitrate at each video. Typically, YouTube seems to use about 220Kbps for the video and maybe 64Kbps for the audio. Of course it isn't going to look or sound very good! However, there isn't anything inherently bad about Flash Video but, at the bitrate of a YouTube video, one might think there is. At a bitrate that approaches the bandwidth of a typical broadband Internet connection, Flash Video can look and sound very acceptable. If it's encoded correctly, it can, in fact, look and sound quite excellent.

It appears that YouTube has embarked on the task of re-encoding a lot of their videos into h.264 Flash. From what I have heard, they aren't doing this to further reduce the bitrate of their videos, but to give the viewer a better looking video experience at the previous bitrate. You've got to give them points for that.

I think we can (mostly) all agree that Macromedia (and now Adobe) have done a pretty good job of making sure that their player is on 99% of the machines out there. Flash Video has achieved "critical mass" and is the most universally playable format available.

No, you can't easily save a copy of the video to your hard drive, but for some content creators, that's a plus. To distribute video via the Internet, as opposed to just watching it, there is always Windows Media. I like Windows Media. It can look great at reasonable bitrates and is almost as universal as Flash Video. As decent as DivX and Quicktime can look, they just aren't as practical for mass consumption.

All factors considered, Flash Video wins and, at high enough bitrates, no apology is necessary for its quality.

John

As I see it now the biggest drawback of Flash video is that it doesn't allow the user to save a copy locally on their machine

That is not a flash feature at all. For delivery I personally, and I currently do this mainly for fun, encode into H.264 and use a flash player for delivery. My player will intelligently tell the user that he needs to upgrade Flash if he has an old version that doesn't support H.264. If I want to give the user the option of downloading the movie I just put a link to it in my player so that he can download the H.264 file. Note - it doesn't have to have an .flv file extension, .mp4 works fine in the flash player as well.

Now, of course this doesn't work for older .flvs that are Sorenson (yuck) or On2 encoded, but then again, that isn't my problem since I don't have any video encoded with these.

I know you have gotten quite a bit of info here, but I wanted to offer a link to some seriously outstanding FLASH video. This is, belive it or not, encoded at only 500k and is a 1280x720p clip.

Freakishly good quality:
http://3172.voxcdn.com/DEMO720-Heroes500.html

I am trying to figure out the best way to encode H.264 from VEGAS. (I don't want to update to FLASH CS3 until a job can pay for it)
I only see the Sony AVC option. Is that the only way to encode to H.264 in Vegas? I have tried ussing custom settings and cannot manage to come close to this quality..

oh, and here is alink to the guy that put the HEROES clip online: http://www.progettosinergia.com/flashvideo/flashvideoblog.htm

As I see it now the biggest drawback of Flash video is that it doesn't allow the user to save a copy locally on their machine

It doesn't disallow it at all. You just need to have a free plugin for your Firefox browser, or any of about a dozen freeware or shareware utilities to make it one-click easy.