Which is Better: Flix or Vid2Flash

[snowdude]

I'm going to buy one of the two in the next couple days and I was wondering if anyone has any opinions on which is Better. I've tried the free copy of Vid2Flash and it seemed to work really well. Vid2Flash is 40$ and Flix is 100$.

What's the advantage of Flix over Vid2Flash. Any comments would be appreciated.

Later.
-Jeff.

[Jonathan_B]

Flix and vid2flash are not similar products. Flix is vastly superior. There are many reasons why vid2flash can not be utilized to create video for the web. Here are a few:
-Flix encodes .asf, .avi, .mov/.qt, .mpeg, .mp3, .wav, .wma, .wmv. vid2flash encodes .mov and mpeg without sound and .avi with the audio out of sync.
-Flix provides audio with perfect sync for all supported formats. vid2flash provides audio only on avi and that audio does not sync up to the video, so in fact there is no audio with vid2flash. If you cannot encode audio in sync with the video, the encoder is useless for most people.
-Flix allows you to set a maximum bitrate to optimize video for web streaming, and Flix includes presets for bandwidths from 28k - 256k. vid2flash has no way to set a maximum bitrate, which means there is no way to control what bandwidth a user is receiving. Consequently, with vid2flash there is no way to create video for people on a dial up connection -- or even a slower broadband connection. In addition, vid2flash has no presets.
-Flix provides audio controls and allows users to select sampling rate, bitrate and mono/stereo. vid2flash has no audio controls at all.
-Flix allows users to resize the video and provides a number of controls that enable users to limit the amount of ram being used by the Flash player. vid2flash does not allow you to resize the video, which means that you cannot control the amount of ram that the flash player will use when the video plays. This is a critical factor. vid2flash encoded video of longer than 15-30 seconds will quickly crash the Flash player on most users' computers.
-Flix has numerous features, including: ability to embed links in video, ability to add metadata to video, ability to output an html file to play the video, image size extrapolation, image smoothing, ability to export .mp3's and .wav's, and swf controls such as loop movie, unload movie and protect movie. vid2flash does not have any of these features.
-Flix provides superior email and forum support, as well as comprehensive documentation and tutorials. vid2flash has no technical support, no user forum, no documentation, and no tutorials.

We have nothing against vid2flash , but we do not want our product confused with the vid2flash product because their capabilities are so vastly different.
Hope this helps.
Jonathan

[snowdude]

Hey Johnathan, Yeah I ended up going with Flix. Spent the hundred dollars or whatever a day or two ago. I'm really happy with the results though. It only took a couple minutes to get the program down. I'm sorry if somehow my post seemed to confuse vid2Flash with Flix though. They are like you said completly different programs. It's like the difference between Flash 5.0 and some dumb program like koolmoves.

I'm really into Flix though - I've found that I can reduce the size of an mpeg or quicktime file to about 1/6 to 1/10 the original size and still have the quality good enough, not only that but it's in Flash. And I've got major bandwidth problems so that helps alot. I have plans on using it extensively in my next project. Actually, I know no one on this board is into snowboarding - but I'm going to use it for snowboarding and skiing trick tips in my next website snowvids.com. Also it eliminates Hot linking or having other people link directly to your clips from other sites. That and all those other factors that you mentioned earlier.

One other thing I've got about 30 GB's of video on my Computer and 2-3 hours of dv footage- mostly stuff that I've filmed but also a couple hundred maybe thousand clips from the internet (like the ones that I posted on that other thread). Just wondering if you wanted anything for the video clips library on the Wildform site. I have to admit most of it's snowboarding or skiing video footage, but i've got a lot of scenary, mountains, weather conditions, city scapes, traffic, etc. etc. That's all filmed by me. Also all those other internet clips which i'm not sure what the copywrite status is on them - If there on about a thousand websites with not authors name is it illegal to use them - I don't know. Well anyways - Thanks for making Flix possible.

-snowdude.

[Jonathan_B]

What you're doing sounds really cool.
I'd be into discussing using your video in the library. Please contact me directly at: jb@wildform.com
peace
jonathan