Good video on the web:

[whiterabbit]

Originally posted by quazi
I work with Warder Brothers Productions, a video and music production company.

We recently published a flash website with some video clips of our work available to view. We used QuickTime on an HTML page for this purpose.

The site is located at:

http://warderbros.com

Now we feel like incorparating the video in a .swf file for better compatibility.

Are there any disadvantages to going with flash? I read somewhere about not going over 320x240.

I use cleaner xl for compression.

What do you think about the best delivery in our case? Should I make Windoze Media available as well?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

According to an article I just read from streaming media magazine, the video player with most penetration was not one of the big 3 QT WM or Real ...or Flash Player but a corporate viewer (can't remember name). In fact the flash player did not even rate second. I would offer WM and QT if you can and I doubt you will have problems with Flash video over 320 240 if its been encoded correctly.

You can also offer swf video that is viewable with pre 6 player such as that encoded with flix or simulated video SV wich is nothing more than sequences of images on a timeline viewable with flash 4 forward.

[dotcommakers]

hey i found amazing use of flash video?

http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/teenagedramaqueen/

check it out... a girl will come suddenly from background and will talk...

how one can do it?

is there any special software of script for this?

[ogri]

thats really cool i like that

how do you do that????????
lol

[blipstation]

thanks for telling me you like it. The piece seems to divide people -after it is one hell of a download unless you have fast broadband in which case it should stream. Some like it, many don't or can't be bothered with it.

It took a lot of work first of all. About a year solid. Shoot lots of stuff with many alternate shots, organise varying bits of order, put it in XML and get flash to intelligently randomise it.

There is a bit of overblown theory on the web site

http://www.blipstation.com/theory.html

that tries to put the piece in some kind of context.

lol

ian

[whiterabbit]

Originally posted by dotcommakers
hey i found amazing use of flash video?

http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/teenagedramaqueen/

check it out... a girl will come suddenly from background and will talk...

how one can do it?

is there any special software of script for this?

You can use sequences of images over a static background. Using this technigue the girl could have walked across the entire screen without a bandwidth penalty.

Not sure if that is what they did here however.

[tputtemans]

hey guys check out my FLV encoding tests:

http://www.tawahi.com/FLVPlayer.php?...st=default.xml

I got some big moffo's there
ranging from 300KB/s to 80KB/s for the Vitalstreams. (trial account expires this friday)

it's all about speed and datarates.
you can test my serverspeed here:
http://www.tawahi.com/speedtest.php

I got speeds of 400-500 KB/s and here in Holland and Belgium the progressive streams are smooth without delays and buffers..
I realise that in other parts of the world that would not be the case, but i don't care hehehe.

[ogri]

how do you get the movie to load up so fast .what kind of line you got.1 meg 2 meg 10 meg??????????

whats the trick

what serve rdo you use

flashcomm
??????????

[tputtemans]

the red FLV icons are progressive downloads, from a Dutch server in Amsterdam.
the pink ones are FlashCom streams yes, from the Vitalstream server in the States.
it's just a 14 day trial account, but i don't think i will use it.. speed is only 80 KB/s from here, not enough for me.

trick? there is no trick except that it is important to know what speed you can serve and know what connection your viewers will have.

[joejubee]

http://www.noriskmailer.com/index.htm

I've been trying to get clients to use video, and most are starting to.

Just my 2 cents.

Joe

[gooneybird]

joejubee

I'm about to start a project doing something very similar...testimonial videos on the homepage. Can you give some info about what you did for your site? Did you encode your video with Flash MX or with another product?

[joejubee]

1) Shoot and edit video.
2) Export video at full size and resolution (no compression)
3) Bring into Sorrenson Squeeze.
4) Export as a .FLA or .SWF
5) Import into FLASH MX movie
6) Add control buttons.
7) Publish.
8) Insert Flash SWF into html page.
9) Admire your handiwork.

If you have any more questions o problems, you can easily find answers here.

Joe

[Jfrasier]

Streaming video is a very pain in the butt, but gratifying experience. I produce streaming video professionally and wanted to share some of my experiences to anyone that needs it.

First I would like to address the QT myth and streaming video. First off, all that streaming video you see on the quicktime site is not true stream. It is progressive. That is why you get the quality you do. When working with QT streams, it only really works well with DSL/cable connection. When you stream 56k QT you can run into a number of issues like synch, buffering etc.

Although RM has great codecs, I do not use it do to platform problems involving windows. You have a likelyhood of at least 80% that it wont work properly, and it Real likes to take over your entire machine.

All in all WMP is the best. The secret is learning the important of asx and playlist files. It produces the best in 56k and broadband IMHO.

I use digital rapids to encode. All said and done it cost 2k to purchase the board and software with free software updates. Before that I used Anystream which had a fantastic workflow involving Avid, but the quality of QT was lacking.

I play with Flash video as a hobby but until Flash MX 2004 came out, I don't think it was true stream but simulated.

I do agree with the original poster, Flash and video does have its place, but you want to focus on the many intricies of web video itself before integrating it with Flash. Remeber, SMIL and ASX is your friend

[plasmanet]

We have just developed a new e-book with video and audio.
It uses the latest flash MX technology.

There's about 200 pages in there and i don;t think anyone
has done anything like this before.

site is
http://www.queensecret.com/home.htm

theres also a trial version with video and audio on it

regards

[Jfrasier]

I saw the WarderBrothers site and I have a few comments for you. First, it seems your buffers need some work. Viewing it on a T1 it had some problems playing smoothly. The audio was nice and video quality as well.

Second, the use of a full page is not really looked upon well professionally. If you look at sites such as MSNBC, CNN, CBS etc.. you will notice the use of a custom made "Viewer" which is a pop-up script to set dimensions. You can view an example on my portfolio site

www.fantasystreetcorner.net

Goto the media link and streaming video. As you can see for each example I used a designed viewer page that was custom sized.

Besides that it looks great

[Wheels]

Well, I just hit both warderbros and fantasy sites - Jfrasier, the thing about the warderbros site is that they are giving you the option of viewing some fairly large files. The streaming problems has to do with a small error on the autoStart selection - probably made in both the movie and the page - which causes problems.

I won't get into the "unprofessional" issues - you have cited some examples which I have rarely found to work properly anyway (MSNBC, etc). Either way I think the warderbros site is nicely done.

On your site I had a problem with the popup - every time I selected a video, I get a popup window, but I get this error message:

"The page “Sherri Parker & SherriParker.com” has content of MIME type “application/x-oleobject”. Because you don’t have a plug-in installed for this MIME type, this content can’t be displayed."

I have every video player available for Mac and I am up to date with codecs, so I know my configuration is right - you may want to make sure you check you work on all systems.

Seems common for PC developers to forget to check things on the Mac (even the big guys) but true professionalism means it works, period. No exceptions, escpecially for a market as big as Mac users.

I rarely see sites that work right it seems, there's always a glitch. Out of all the sites using video that I have seen over the last six months, I can only think of a handful that didn't have problems. It all boils down to planning and testing - but this seems to be something few developers concern themselves with.

It's also the reason why you won't see me posting links to our sites here. We have spent countless hours fixing Flash's glitches with rewriting code at the function, object and proto levels. It's just too easy to rip code nowadays, that's why I never introduced the video component I was promising earlier this year or show many examples on our own site.

I often see requests for .swf files in our server logs, so people are peeking at our code.

We are currently migrating to Flash 7, with hopes of being able to hide more of our code as a result.

[Jfrasier]

I agree totally wheels. The reason for my site is that I have yet to encode to QT atm it is all windows media player. But that will be fixed eventually when I actually get some time to do it.

The reason I really like the pop-up viewer and I think they are so popular is mostly branding. The work I do on SherriParker.com and MartinWeiss.com is working with custom built databases. So the idea of Pop-up allows for the pulldown to interact with the DB.

I do agree about WarderBrothers, it is a great site.

I think with streaming (at least in my experience) I have always focused more on the players and codecs and less on embedding it in Flash. Though after seeing Flash 2004 pro I am going to definately check that out. Personally I like the freedom of ASX and SMIL programming, but another problem with QT is that they are fighting with RM atm for usability rights of the SMIL format, so sometimes it pulls up the RP for QT video.

[Jfrasier]

BTW wheels I checked out your site, and that is some really sweet masking.

[author]

I've been having good luck streaming short clips using SwishMax and Sorenson ... here's a fun example:

http://ralph.nuoj.com/sphere.php

and a "work" example:

http://weekendmillionaire.com/abtechtmp.php

--Ralph

[Fab]

if this has not been posted yet its quite a nice site
and the video looks great and its really nicely integrate in the
design.

Any tips on how they did this??
streaming video maybe?
ok I figured in the begining the cafe' foreground is a pgn with
various pgn animations (ei. steam vapors from the cup)
but the video quality is great! and the sequences are not that short
and they seem to load quite quickly... that is why I started to think
mx 2004 wt video streaming...
any way to find out with site is using streaming? probably not...

http://www.volvocars.se/v50


ciao

FB

[richbrenner]

Great POV flash video here: www.cosmicplanet.com

And high quality interview video using flash here:
www.interviewclips.com