How to make my flash video play smooth on my web ?

Hi , i have a mini mini , video reel on my web , its a flash file , actually is a converted avi to a swf file , the thing is , i dont want to lower more thw quality , but i’ve seen other pages like for example www.flstudio.com where the video plays so smooth .

What can i do to make my flash play smoother without lowering the quality ?

thanx

First, pay for your hosting, and see what outbound rate they guarantee. Free hosts choke their bandwidth, which limits your outbound bit rate.

Second, keep it short and small. Use HD 50% (1k) stills to highlight detail, and motion to just do the fly-around at say 320x240.

man , im paying for my hosting , godaddy , i’ll check my outband rate.

With HD 50% you mean the format in blender right ? or the compression ? i use super c for converting from avi to swf.

Thanx

Yes, keep it to a “normal” aspect ratio - most codecs are efficient at a 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio.

Not sure about SuperC and avi to swf. It is best to keep the source as high a quality (and big :frowning: file) and then tweak the compression settings to get as small a file as possible. No sound. Try using a few colors as possible, also, or reducing them (quantizing) using the noodle I developed and posted here and in the wiki (search for Quantize). Quantizing can reduce the number of colors used without killing quality, and yet (I suspect) really help out the codec in compressing file size.

Don’t embedd you AVI in your SWF. This does not work too well.

What you need to do is convert your AVI to an FLV then use the builtin FLV component to load your FLV file from the SWF.

Use the video encoder that comes with flash or use quicktime pro to produce the FLV.
Open up flash and create a new document the size of your video.
Press CTRL-F7 to to open up the components window.
Choose FLV playback by double clicking on it. You will get a component on stage and in the library.
Press SHIFT-F7 to bring up the component inspector window. Click on “contentPath” and browse to your FLV file.
Publish your SWF and enjoy!

Using the component inspector, you can also add playback controls to your video as well.

You can use also ffmpeg on linux to ouput the flv. And Riva free flv encoder, if you are on windows. A very good flv player(is an swf), open source, which you can copy in your server, is flowplayer. Just put in the settings a good preload time, or good buffering, depending on size and weight of the video, and which conections do you target to.

Smooth means no buffer ran out of data: good preload time, or do the size per frame/chunk(yeh, 320x200…etc.I prefer bigger with more forced preload. ), as low as to allow the downloading progress bar go as fast as the playing one.

Also, flv is much better(and reliable) for videos than raw swf. Specially long videos. Use swf for the player only, is how youtube etc do.

You may want to look at the _quality actionscript command in flash as well. You can toggle between high and low quality as the movie is playing. If you set it to “LOW” during the trouble spots the animation will play faster (but, images and text may appear a little rough). I never use it personally but it might be helpful in certain situations.
Remember, some internet users may have slow computers. Following the tips above will help ensure that your movie performs the same everywhere.

Thanx , i had to re read this a couple of times.

I dont use flash , i dont use quicktime pro , its all blender avi converted to swf , so i should convert my avi it to flv , then use flowplayer , add it a load time, and also the quantize noodle ,

Can i export flv via the ffmpeg output format in blender ?

If not i’ll try Riva free flv encoder.

Thanx

yep, but in my case with an unoficial win build -no oficial by then, maybe either now- it was mainly sorenson codec for flv and couldnt get a nice result, not enough…since then flash sv codec been solidly added, and it’s said now works, though that’s heavy in memory

I used riva b4 to have on2 flix, so, I recomend it as a free possibility. The quality if well configured , can be quite high, not as good as on2, as is based in older format, but hey. Main issue fo rme was the size in Ks, but as am restricted hugely in my company on vids size. So, for personal and portfolio stuff, and for professional if have no very small memory size restriction, is nice thingie…there are tiny tricks, you can set custom resolution and stuff with some trick…you’ll discover experimenting, I can’t remember right now…

I’ve used riva for pro work, so , no issues. Right now sure neither with ffmpeg, even being in windows.

of course, ffmpeg is more difficult to handle really well, but is also much more flexible.

If your website lacks bandwidth, host the video elsewhere. If you upload to Blip.tv you’ll get a permalink to the original file that you can use on your own site with your own flash player applet.

The current Flash 9.0 plugin can play MP4 files (with H.264 video and AAC audio) as well as FLV. H.264 compression is more efficient than FLV’s codecs, so the video will look better without wasting bandwidth. Picture aspect ratio is not really important but most codecs are optimized for frame dimensions where the width and height is a multiple of 16 pixels.