Monkeypants, please read Kraken's post here at the FK MX forum:

http://board.flashkit.com/board/show...hreadid=277792

This is a Flash profesional speaking about the slow saturation of Flash players; what this person says is a real eye-opener. THE reason why Flash MX will be very slow to compete with Flix is Macromedia's enormous mistake in having video made in MX only work in the Flash player 6.

This is a valid point. Fortunately, Flashplayer 6 will support all of the functions supported by version 5, and Flashplayer 5 will play all of the flash 5 functions generated by .swf's exported from MX

What this all boils down to (in terms of the video features) is that those who still have Flash 4 or 5 players installed will get either a)a message at the beginning of the presentation explaining thath they won't see the video portions -or- b) the designer will have had the foresight to simply modify the video functions for Flash 4/5 and have a little sniffer before the movie begins, and load different variables for different player versions. It would take very little effort.

Flix will remain the number one video to Flash converter for at least a year!

You are correct in this... to an extent. People who don't do a ton of video, or who don't know how to use Flash and opt to exclusively use programs like Swish and 3DFA will continue to use programs like Flix simlply because of their ease of use

I think that Flash sites that are video heavy will use the MX video functions extensively. Partly becuse of how easy it will be to work with the video files (they're in the library, just like any other object... no load movie considerations) and the filesize is much smaller.


Pros and design houses will just not take a chance in NOT advising their clients that MX-produced video work will only be biewable in, what, 3% of the public's browsers for the next 6 months? When they do, clients will just give a BIG thumbs-down.

If they are designers of any caliber, they will will take that into consideration when they are planning their projects, and explore using more than one method of delivery for each presentation. The truth is that if the designer is working with the general public audience in mind, they are not using .swf video at all simply because the average viewer is on a dial up connection. I think designers will get used to developing flexible .swf content, just as they have gotten used to writing code for multiple browsers.


To quote MethodAir:

I've encoded 30 second .mov files in Flix at *22* fps, with far better resolution than your examples, same dimensions, coming in around 2 mb's...the jury's still out on this one.

In terms of delivery, Flix video simply isn't practical for files of this length. How many people do you know that will wait 6 minutes for 30 seconds of video?

My examples were to illustrate a comparitive point. At 300k and 322k, the video almost streams over an average 56k connection. This makes it practical for delivery in almost every circumstance.

Long live Flix.

I hope so. Wildform had delivered some pretty ingenious products... and I'm sure they will continue to do so.

To JB: You have been handed a life-line on a plate by MM's stupidity (Can be nothing else but stupidity. Very surprising to see such a well established company making the entire internet start all over again with a Flash program that produced video that is not compatible with previous versions of their player).

Flash, like all communication technologies, is in a state of constant revision. There are going to be changes, and tools & players will become obsoleted. People are not so against change as you might think. If they were we'd all still be riding horses. There's plenty of Flash 5 sites out there... and plenty of Flash 5 players to watch them,...and Flash 5 isn't so old.

Don't fluff it. If I were you I would (dump swfx) pool all Wildform resources into making Flix unbeatable in the 6-9 months you have been handed. This means "save in players" and "save in web page templates". Your encoding is first-rate, just concentrate on the gloss

Keep in mind that the technology Macromedia is using for the Flash 6 player will eventually be available to license. Then the Wildform forls will be able to release a new version of Flix that will use the same codec, and offer the same easy to use front end that made Flix such a great program to begin with. That's how it works when you are in the business of an evolving technology.