FLV video encoding/transcoding

Submitted by mwpeters on February 1, 2008 - 12:43pm.

Geek Out!

Flash Video is all the rage for internet presentation these days, and that requires encoding or transcoding.

Any one have suggestions on alternatvies?
"Best" alternatives?
Acceptable inexpensive alternatives?
Poor/bad alternatives?

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a couple options

Submitted by Muddy River Media on February 2, 2008 - 10:24am.

OF course, for most encoding jobs, the best way to go would be some version of Sorenson Squeeze. If you are only looking to flv's then you could buy "sorenson squeeze for flash"

http://www.sorensonmedia.com/p...

The good things about this software is that it does a very good, fast job of encoding. It also is able to encode to H.264 videos which could be important for you in the future.

However, you will notice that you have to pay extra for the On2 VP6 Pro Encoder plugin. This is a very important ability. Being able to encode with the VP6 flash output will save you about half of the bandwidth with nearly the same quality as with the Standard FLV encoder. The option to save bandwidth or increase quality at the current bandwidth makes the VP6 codec very appealing.

Having said all that, you are looking at $300 to get Sorenson Squeeze with the VP6 encoder plugin. That's quite a bit of cheese.

What I would suggest is to download a trial version of On2's flash encoder. It won't give you all the bells and whistles, it won't encode to H.264, but it does VP6 output and only costs $39.

http://www.on2.com/index.php?3...

Download the free trial and see if it will do what you want it to do.

http://www.on2.com/index.php?4...

Hope this helps some.

Mark Fogarty
www.MuddyRiverMedia.org

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VP6 Flash Encoding

Submitted by mwpeters on February 2, 2008 - 3:46pm.

Any limitations or concerns with using VP6?
Are there other options for getting VP6 other than the ON2 and SorensonMedia products?

Am I correct in assuming I won't get VP6 using either Adobe Flash or FFmpeg (or products built on top of it).

I tried the demo of the standard ON2 Flix product ($39), but I was quite disappointed by the degraded video. I'm hoping this was due to the the more limited, single pass processing.

I'm going to try the demo of Flix Pro, just to see how much difference it would make.

What is the format/quality

Submitted by Muddy River Media on February 3, 2008 - 5:45pm.

What is the format/quality of the source video that you are using? I just did a test of the Standard on2 flix product and was very pleased with the quality... and I didn't even use the highest quality preset (1,000K CD Video [VPT-E FLV]) but used the next lower quality setting, 512K Broadband High Video. And I gotta be honest, I pretty fussy when it comes to video quality.

I haven't played around with it much, but I think it does an amazing job for just $39 dollars, and there are more then enough controls to allow me to tweak the balance between bandwidth and quality.

In fact, the video I tested is one I have currently on Youtube, and on there it looks like crap, but on2 flix did a great job keeping the textures, the movement, the motion blur. I was very impressed with it.

The reason I ask about your source video is that it has a GREAT deal to do with the final video quality any encoding software can output.

What software are you creating your source video in?

What format and settings are you outputting your source video as?

Personally, what I do is render my final video in the QuickTime format using the Animation compression setting. This will create a large file size, but it is only a temporary file. If you try and play this video on your computer, it will probably play poorly because your computer can't handle the size/quality of it. However, it is a great file format to import into any encoding software if you want a high quality output.

After I have encoded the flash video (or mpeg1, or mpeg2 or whatever...) I delete the animation file, or if it's small enough, I will archive it.

By way of example... the video file I used as my source to test on2 flix standard was 640 x 480 in size, 2:08 in length and just over 3GB in size. I encoded it to be a flash video 320 x 480 and the final size was 7MB. The quality was excellent.

Encoding video is a very complicated science/art and I don't claim to know much about it. I will recommend a couple options for you to learn more though.

A great place to ask compression questions is the Creative Cow Compression Techniques Forum. They will be MUCH smarter then I ever could be about encoding issues.

http://forums.creativecow.net/...

There is also a great DVD tutorial for video compression done by Aharon Rabinowitz.

http://store.creativecow.net/p...

Aharon covers a lot of uses that people want to encode video for, such as... mpeg1's, mpeg2's, flash video, video tutorials, podcasting, etc...

Everything that Aharon does is well thought out, well explained, professional yet entertaining.

Hope this helps you as you dive into the murky world of video compression.

Mark Fogarty
www.MuddyRiverMedia.org

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Get Muddy... It's Free!
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I need to experiment with video codec options

Submitted by mwpeters on February 3, 2008 - 6:34pm.

Thanks for the suggestion. It does look like I need to play with settings some more. I certainly like the $40 price and in other respects the feature set seems adequate for what I wanted.

I was able to get much better video results with FlixPRO, but I also used much different settings. I don't have a specific target. I tried a short speaker vidcast that was originally done in mp4.

I'm in early stages of this. More toying around with feasibility of using video for a couple non-profit sites, speakers and educational presentation stuff is most likely target content.

You should be able to get

Submitted by Muddy River Media on February 3, 2008 - 9:29pm.

You should be able to get excellent results with the standard version... just not near as many options to customize the settings. I would be very interested in what settings you changed in the Pro version that made the quality difference.

I can't stress enough that the work flow leading up to the encoding process is just as important for good results. I would never be happy with using an mp4 to encode to flash, unless of course that was the absolutely only option I had for a file type.

Obviously somebody is filming these speakers and presentations. What are they then capturing and editing it in? If they are using a half-way decent piece of software, they should be able to render the final video out into something that is lossless. This will give you a much better final flash video.

Let me know your work flow for your video, from shooting it until you are ready to encode it to flash. That would help me understand better why your results have been less then satisfactory.

Mark Fogarty
www.MuddyRiverMedia.org

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Get Muddy... It's Free!
-----------------------

FREE Video to FLV Converter

Submitted by CodeCowboy on April 25, 2008 - 10:14pm.

The options for bandwidth, etc are limited to presets, but it does the job.

It's called "Free Video To Flash Converter 3.2.1.1"

Get it from http://DVDVideoSoft.com

I've been using it recently and it works great. Even provides you with different players to use and outputs the HTML you will need. Of course I didn't find that till after I got a different player working manually. :)

--Tony
"I can make it good, fast and cheap...pick any two."