fantasy interactive

[jor133d]

Can does fantasy interactive get such large video documentaries to load so fast on there website? I would like to include videos that large on one of my websites. What are the steps to creating something like that, that loads so fast?


http://www.fantasy-interactive.com/

[Philboi]

Hey, ive been having a look at these guys recently and they do some awesome stuff. However, i think the reason they run large videos soo fast is because they use streaming servers which are extremely fast.

If there was ways to run videos that fast without using streaming servers, i would like to know too :P

[LEXGRAPHICS]

atleast not till this day... check out vitalstream.com htey have good fast srevers with a redundant framewor, meaning your video is on multiple servers, and for sake of speed, if one server is too full it will use another server for better connections thats how they do it.. or at least im pretty sure thats it

[jor133d]

so there is nothing I can do?

[LEXGRAPHICS]

get flashcomm hosting at vitalstream.com

[MONSTERBOY]

I don't think they are using real streaming. If they were you'd be able to skip to any part of the movie. Which you can't until it's finished downloading which means they are using progressive download.

I'm also trying to discover their trick to making the video so big and still look good. My best guess is they compress it at high quality at about 1/2 the size, then just scale it up. If you look, some of their videos are actually quite chippy and pixelated but since the video is so big it doesn't really get in the way.

If anyone can tell us more information on how they did their video, it would be great...

[Wheels]

The Volvo video is an .flv, coming off of a streaming server according to the source URL.

The video is not being scaled in Flash, but rather was scaled on compression - the size you see on the screen is the size of the video (dimensions).

The .flv runs about 3.5mb per minute, so I wouldn't say that it's very efficient - I've always tried to keep things around 2mb per minute. Actually the quality could be improved - as they are using dimensions that are not a factor of 4 (674x370). If they had used dimensions that are divisible by 4 the quality would be a bit better.

The reason it's good quality is that they started with good source and there is a low compression rate on the video.

I think the reason that their video streams faster is because they have good servers and good programming. Their design work isn't so bad either.

[MONSTERBOY]

Thanks for the information Wheels. You seem to know quite a bit. I have a couple questions about streaming servers. I'm beginning a job where there will be quite alot of videos to stream, and potentially a LOT of traffic. I am trying to find out if there's a hosting solution out there that serves streaming video and also can serve alot of bandwidth with no problem. Any suggestions? I really don't want to hassle with setting up servers in-house. that would bring a whole set of problems I'd rather not deal with...if you know what I mean.

It's interesting what you said about making the video dimensions a multiple of 4. Also, this might be a rediculous question but what is the method of measuring how many megabyts the video is per minute? I'd absolutely LOVE to learn this if you can spare a few minutes. Mucho Appreciation!

MB

PS--Oh I checked the size of that Volvo video and on the screen its actually 738 x 369 pixels. Do you know why it's this big on screen and where did you get your size?

[Wheels]

I'm not too up on current streaming video servers, but I believe there are a couple of links elsewhere in this post on providers, should be affordable if you have a paying client.

Use the bandwidth profiler in Flash to do testing, or just do some math - you know the duration and the file size - so it should be pretty simple.

As far as the size of Fantasy/Volvo video - I downloaded the .flv and imported it to Flash to check the size. I should have measured their screen size before when I was checking the actual dimensions - so they are stretching it - probably to fit an uncommon window size that was created as part of their interface design.

It would definitely look better in factors of 4.

I noticed as well that they run their Flash movies (not .flvs) at 90 fps - I'll have to give that a try.