Turn QuickTime video into Flash .swf file

[swideo]

Hi,

Just wanted to put the word out about a new product, "SWIDEO", which turns QuickTime video into Flash .swf files. It's been a while in the making and now it's ready for all you Flash pros. You can also download a FREE DEMO VERSION. So check it out at:

http://www.swideo.com

Some of the features are:
o Fast Export
o Small file size
o Great synched streaming sound
o Small memory usage
o Professional
o Most optimal video exporter

Let us know what you think.
[Edited by swideo on 03-30-2001 at 11:35 AM]

[johnie]

The Demo File you have on your website is very nice but there is no demo version of the software? You allow a download but then ask for a serial code and when not provided it shuts down...

Couldn't you offer a disabled or branded demo or something?

I admit, that your sample has the best audio quality but how can someone be sure they will get the same Audio Qaulity without a demo? Vid 2 SWF will supply the same quality of audio if you replace the track with your own custom track (I didn't see this in your feature list) so I asuume that the audio was from the original but I can not be for sure without testing the product more?

You also claim that it is "The best and most optimal video exporter for the Macromedia® Flash™ players" but I have to ask without a comparision to the other products what does this mean? How does your product export stack up against Flix or Vid 2 SWF?

Also do you realize, after the trial, your product will be the most expensive of its type while supporting the least number of file type conversions/features? Are you purposely trying to price yourself over the competition? If you are then why? Put that, in writing, on your page... Why should someone pay $25 more dollars for your product than Flix and about $100 more for your product than Vid 2 SWF?

Finally, You offer a Flash 4 and Flash 5 Sample in SWF and FLA loader but never document how you created it. Are you aware that any product that creates SWF and has the load Movie action can use this product? There is a large comunity of users who have 3'rd party Flash creation tools but don't own Flash. They can't read the FLA. You may be Asking Just how large? Well you would have to get the number of Live Motion, Swish, Insane Flash Animator, Flare, Corel R.A.V.E., Kool Moves, PHP with SWF Lib or Ming installed, ETC ETC and add them all together and that would be the 3'rd Party SWF creation Market and since Ming and Lib SWF are Free GPL products it would be hard to track how many Ming and Lib SWF users there are- although I know of 1 for a fact one site has used Lib SWF to animate a Splash entrance and I know the estimated distribution of PHP is in the millions. The only market numbers I have seen, that are solid, are from Swish, which has distributed over 100,000 registration keys, that's not counting downloads, that is paying customers!!! Do you really want to alienate a market that large? This Forum itself is all about creating products that produce SWF outside of Flash and the SWF format itself...
The 3'rd party market has grown large enough that several compabnies are changing there statements by stating that yes, indeed thier products will work with products that produce SWF's other than Flash. I was happy to see that Wildform and other companies changed finally added Live Motion to products that will work with thier products (The are still alieniating the Corel, Swish, Flare, Kool Moves, PHP users but hey its a step in the right direction). The long and the short of what I am saying is, that the SWF format is open but the FLA format is closed. Most SWF creation tools have thier own closed source file format which is closed for example a Live Motion Source File is LIV and a Swish file is SWI. Only the product that created the source file can read it. So what I am saying is write out the actions you are doing instead of just offering a source file.

[swideo]

Johnie,

You have very good comments. Let us try to answer some of the issues which you bring up

> Couldn't you offer a disabled or branded demo or
> something?

We will try to create and then post a demo version within the next several days on our web site. We will post a message in this thread as soon as a demo version is available. We certainly don’t have an objection to the try before you buy approach.

> I admit, that your sample has the best audio quality …
> I assume that the audio was from the original but I
> can not be for sure without testing the product more?

Yes, you are correct the sound came from the original track.

> You also claim that it is "The best and most optimal
> video exporter for the Macromedia® Flash™ players" but
> I have to ask without a comparision to the other products
> what does this mean? How does your product export stack
> up against Flix or Vid 2 SWF?

Our video exporter creates more efficient .swf files. Is faster during export. The final .swf files have better synchronized sound and use considerably less memory during playback.

> So what I am saying is write out the actions you
> are doing instead of just offering a source file.
We will try to provide an explanation on how a parent movie can load a .swf video file.

hope this answers most of your questions

[johnie]

Yes, Thank You!!

[sounddude]

Hi,

All it took for me to be sold was to test the demo and watch my processor. The other tools ramp up the processor until it becomes completely unmanageable. SWvideo does not cripple the user's processor. Plus there are other tricks that you can do by preparing your quicktime movies with quicktime pro and media cleaner that make this program the best option.

While I haven't testing importing features, I have successfully converted a variety of large movies. I tried all of the others and this one is the best for my money.

[johnie]

I think I am in agreement with you. I am still waiting for the Flix conversion to get back to me but I expect the Flix conversion to be worse than the Vid2SWF conversion. From what I have seen it is better at converting MOV than Vid2SWF. The pricing structure and additional features of VID2SWF make it slightly more attractive. Why they, swideo, decided to use the same pricing structure as Flix I don't know but then why Vid2SWF decided to adopt the same price structure as QT Pro I don't know. I am sure that both bussiness models are trade secretes.

I'll share the conversion data that I have right now...

Based on 2 samples... The QT apple sample.

Swideo only read explanation:
EXPORT TIME: 11sec
EXPORTED FILE SIZE: 2401K

I could not get Vid2SWF to convert the sound in the MOV format. I had to switch to AVI to get sound which may not be a fair:

Double conversion from MOV to AVI in QT then with Vid2SWF
Export time 20 seconds
Export File Size: 2568K

Sample 2
Export Time 1 Second 2 seconds
Exported File size 116K 119K
Swideo is on the left

Vid2SWF does not handle sound well in the MOV format. In fact Vid2SWF does not handle the MOV format very well at all. I converted the Movie in QT Pro to AVI and then used Vid2SWF and got near exact results but this isn't fair really a fair comparision?

[Javakitty]

Thanks johnie!

Yes "vid2flash" (aka vid2swf) has some QuickTime limitations regarding sound. We are getting this worked out as I write this. We are also working to add sound support to mpeg format and we will be adding full support for other common video formats like Real and Windows Media.

vid2flash does currently support sound directly with .avi.

As to the low price for the full version($25.00) we simply feel this is that this is the most reasonable price for developers.

So far hundreds of flash developers worldwide have purchased vid2flash software simply because it is easy to test and and easy to use. They will all qualify for the upgrade when we have it completed.

http://www.javakitty.com/vid2flash/

http://www.javakitty.com/vid2flash/vid2flash_zip.exe
[Edited by Javakitty on 03-25-2001 at 01:55 AM]

[johnie]

Is this the same product as http://www.geocities.com/vid2swf ?

The interface is diffrent and I didn't do conversion with this product...

[Javakitty]

Yes!
Same developer, same program, same price, new UI and a few new features.

[swideo]

Thanks Johnie for all you great comments about swideo. We just posted a free demo version of our software. You can check it out at http://www.swideo.com or just download the free demo directly at http://www.swideo.com/swideo2demoinstaller.exe You will be impressed!

[swideo]

Originally posted by sounddude
Hi,

All it took for me to be sold was to test the demo and watch my processor. The other tools ramp up the processor until it becomes completely unmanageable. SWvideo does not cripple the user's processor. Plus there are other tricks that you can do by preparing your quicktime movies with quicktime pro and media cleaner that make this program the best option.

While I haven't testing importing features, I have successfully converted a variety of large movies. I tried all of the others and this one is the best for my money.

Great comments sounddude. We early on decided to pay lot's of attention to export speed, files size and performance. We currently support only QuickTime, because we invested all our time into quality instead of quantity. We feel that the final video .swf file that we produce is the best in the business. That's why we have a free demo download at http://www.swideo.com so that the users can judge for themselves.

[sobeit]

We have the Flix product at work, but I've noticed that it does not work well if the video is over 30 seconds long. How long can the Video be if it's created by Swideo?

[swideo]

Originally posted by sobeit
We have the Flix product at work, but I've noticed that it does not work well if the video is over 30 seconds long. How long can the Video be if it's created by Swideo?

Actually a lot of our users have been surprised at the fact that we can produce manageable .swf video streams, for the Macromedia Flash Player, which are longer than 30 seconds. We ran some test against the other two similar products and here are the results we got.

The QuickTime movie we used was an 85 second trailer with a stage size of 240x136. We exported the movie at 8 frames per second. vid2swf product had a hard time exporting sound from a QuickTime movie so, even though we can handle sound flawlessly, we decided not to export sound for this test. Against vid2swf our performance was impressive to say the least!

Swideo
----------------------------------
Export Time: 11sec
Final Movie Size: 1,856,634 bytes
Memory usage of the exported
file in the player: 2mb

vid2swf
----------------------------------
Export Time: 131sec
Final Movie Size: 2,219,634 bytes
Memory usage of the exported
file in the player: 90mb


If you look at the comparisons above we are 12 times faster at exporting QuickTime video into a .swf file, produce 20% smaller file size, and use 45 times less memory during playback. We don’t feel that an exported .swf file which takes up 90mb of memory, while being played in the Flash player, for an 85 second video is acceptable.

We don’t own a Flix product, they don’t have a demo version (hmm, interesting, what’s that about?), and so we asked one of our users to run similar tests on the Flix. Their actual comment was “Swideo is faster by an order of magnitude.” Overall, they got similar results as above. We had the same memory usage advantage as described above. We will be getting back with more actual numbers soon. This user actually tried out the other two products and then switched to Swideo ( http://www.swideo.com ) as soon as our product was available. What we are finding is that many of our users actually tried other products and then eventually switched to Swideo. Read the comment posted in this thread by SoundDude. He calls this the “Best Offering So Far”. Here are some actual quotes from our users:

“best offering so far”

“I have successfully converted a variety of large movies. I tried all of the others and this one is the best for my money.”

“Thank you, your application helps me create better solutions for my clients”

“The optimization that you created is the perfect answer for the video to flash problem”

“Thanks again for making this available, you have made my job easier and enhanced my capabilities”

We have had a proposal from one company to use Swideo technology in a server product. Swideo is that fast!!! So in answer to your question of how long your video can be when using Swideo to create Flash video files. We feel you can go 1,2,5,10 minutes and even longer. The only limitation is the number of frames (16,000) that a Flash movie can have. Don’t take our word for it. We urge you to download the free demo at http://www.swideo.com and try it out for yourself before you make your final decision.

[bmhoover]

I am trying SWvideo and it does not seem to work. When I export a SWF all I get is the first frame of the movie repeated for every frame. Do you know what is causing this?

Thanks

[swideo]

Originally posted by bmhoover
I am trying SWvideo and it does not seem to work. When I export a SWF all I get is the first frame of the movie repeated for every frame. Do you know what is causing this?

Thanks

It sound like what you are trying to do is import the .swf file produced by the demo product into Flash Authoring. The release version of the product allows you to do that, but the demo version does not. Actually, overall we don't recommend importing files created by Swideo or any other similar product into Flash authoring. Video files are generally large and importing them into your Flash authoring project would take up too much of your memory resources, not to mention get rid of all the optimizations done by the converter. We recomment using the load movie action to load the video files into your main movie. We have an online manual on our site ( http://www.swideo.com )which talks about that. Go to the bottom of of the manual. There we also explain why it's not a good idea to create very long movie clips out of video sequences. We also provide links in the manual to samples on how to load a movie into your main movie. Take a look at those and see if that helps.

[sobeit]

Thanks for the info. We eventually bought SWIDEO and it turned out to be the best solution for us. Wish we would have known about the product earlier.

[Jonathan_B]

Hello.
I'm Jonathan from Wildform, the creators of Flix.
I wanted to straighten out the misconceptions some people appear to have on this thread regarding Flix. I know we were the first video to flash encoder on the market, which makes us the obvious target for potential competitors. However, Flix is a very different product from Swideo and Vid2Flash. Quite frankly, there are many reasons why Flix is vastly superior for creating web video.
Here are just a few:
-Flix encodes .asf, .avi, .dv, .mov/.qt, .mpeg, .mp3, .wav, .wma, and .wmv (and numerous still image formats). Swideo only encodes .mov (and those .mov's must have a constant frame rate). vid2flash only encodes .mov and mpeg without sound and .avi with the audio out of sync.
-Flix allows you to set a maximum bitrate to optimize video for web streaming. Swideo and vid2flash have no way to set a maximum bitrate, which means there is no way to automatically control what bandwidth a user is receiving. Consequently, with those other programs, creating video for people on a dial up connection -- or even a slower broadband connection is a time-consuming, trial and error process, and it is extremely difficult to get a satisfactory result. The importance of this point cannot be underestimated. Flix is the only tool that is designed to optimize video for web streaming.
-Flix includes presets for creating video for users with connection speeds from 28k - 512k (including presets for banner ads). Swideo and vid2flash have no presets.
-Flix encoded video provides superior image quality at lower file sizes - comparable Swideo and vid2flash encoded video have substantially larger file sizes than Flix.
-Flix provides mp3 audio while Swideo only has ADPCM audio. Flix’s mp3 audio has a lower minimum bitrate and better quality audio at lower bitrates. So Flix encoded audio is better in terms of both quality and size. vid2flash (which has no audio controls) provides audio only on avi and that audio does not sync up to the video, so in fact there is no audio with vid2flash.
-Flix allows users to resize the video in any way they want, and Flix provides controls to set custom SWF dimensions as well. Swideo only offers options of 25%, 50% and 100% of the input video image size, while vid2flash has no way to resize the video.
-Flix has controls for both video framerate (distinct video images per second) and SWF framerate. Swideo and vid2flash encoded video must have the same video and SWF framerates. This means that if you want to load a Swideo or vid2flash encoded video into a larger Flash movie that has an SWF framerate of 12fps, your output video will have 12 distinct video frames, resulting in a very large file size - which is not possible at 28k or 56k bandwidths.
-Flix has numerous features, including: ability to output an html file to play the video, ability to embed links in video, ability to add metadata to video, image size extrapolation, image smoothing, ability to export .mp3's and .wav's, and swf controls such as protect movie, loop movie, and unload movie. Swideo and vid2flash do not have any of these features.
-The latest version of Flix (1.5) encodes videos of any length, up to the maximum number of frames allowed in the Flash player (which is 16,000), and it has improved the performance. If you have an older version of Flix, download a newer version.
It is also worth noting that we are a real company based in Venice, CA. We accept all major credit cards, and we provide a complete help file, tutorials, forum and email support.
Finally, we are sorry that we do not yet have a trial version of our software available. Trial versions make it extremely easy for people to hack your software. But we are working on one and plan to release it soon. We do, however, provide numerous examples of our Flix encoded SWF video. We have posted 6 different complete movie trailers encoded at 5 different bandwidths so users can get an accurate picture of what Flix's capabilities are. These videos were encoded from AVIs captured from a standard VHS tape without any special processing.
We have nothing against these other products , but we do not want Flix confused with them because Flix has so many more capabilities. Flix is specifically designed to create swf encoded video with sync sound that is optimized for web streaming.
Best,
Jonathan
jb@wildform.com
(By the way, Jonathan is my real name. I don't feel the need to hide behind some anonymous user name. You can contact me directly if you have any questions.)
[Edited by Jonathan_B on 04-19-2001 at 07:59 PM]

[Flash Git]

Johnathan, people aren`t confusing Flix with the other apps they are simply reminding everyone that Flix is one of the currently available 3rd party video to SWF converters on the market. Your product is and will continue to be mentioned in the same breath as Vid2SWF and Swideo etc and if you don`t like that- tough! Grow up. Flix was the first and remains the most sophisticated product of this genre, and it also has the most functionality. It is a beautiful program to use. Be honest though, some of the things that Flix can do on-the-fly can be done after conversion in the HTML embedding code, like sizing etc. Some people like to do this tweaking last when they look at how it sits on the page. Also, I`m told that your "smoothing" function only serves to produce enormous resulting SWFs and almost brings you back to square one. I hope you all know that the main reason users want to convert to SWF is the reduction in file-size. Everything else is lovely. Being able to include it in other Flash graphics is also fab, but it`s not the main reason for converting video. For the users it`s all about making usable video in small file-sizes.

Your remark about nick-names is also un-called for. You should already be aware that many of the big boys in computing, including the infamous Bill Gates, started in their bedrooms. Most software designers start out out with nothing but a good idea then build a company. I think we can tell that the maker of Vid2SWF is just starting out, and I along with many others have followed his progress from when he just had a silly free site at Geocities. He is to be applauded for his courage and honesty, and his ambition instead of being ridiculed by you. He was always honest from the start saying he was trying something new and he wanted to see if people wanted this sort of thing. Be more gracious and honest in future!

Instead of wasting your time jealously guarding your product you should hurry up and offer a trial of Flix like all the software comanies do.

[xnxnxn]

Flash Git,

You're the man. Thanks for the nice words. Flix is indeed a strong organization. It's easy for these people to ridicule us because they have to pay a lot of salaries and that's also why they charge so much for their tool. Sure it has a nice range of features but actually they were not the first ones out the door. I introduced vid2swf in the end of 2000.

Good luck everyone and keep up the good work.

Xn
Mail: vid2swf@yahoo.com
Site: http://www.geocities.com/vid2swf
Discuss: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vid2swf

[adsalive]

Hi guys. I think you both have useful products, but for
someone like myself who absolutely needs to do volumes
of files in batch mode, I can't understand why Flix
does not offer a batch mode. Surely that must be simple
enough to do. Vid2Swf and Flix are different products for
different purposes. I applaude both of you, because it is no
simple process to compress and convert all these file types, but I can imagine there will be lots more folks like myself who need to be able to run this kind of tool on multiple files in batch mode. Let the non-techies use the cute gui tools. Technical folks need command-line tools they can run anytime.