Streaming Media - August/September 2007 - (Page 48)

The FLVPlayback component gives you a video player that’s ready to go, right out of the box. It features several pre-built skins to choose from that feature the standard video controls as well as a scrubber/progress bar—and even support for fullscreen video. The FLVPlaybackCaptioning component is a handy-dandy addition that lets you feed in standard timed-text files to add closed-captioning to your video. Then there are the individual user-interface playback elements that you can just drag and drop, arrange however you like, and easily link to your video, allowing you to create completely custom playback UIs in minutes. Coupled with the completely rewritten virtual machine (the “guts” of the player . . . a good term to throw around when chatting with those IT guys) the new video components can really speed up both the development and the performance of your Flash Video applications. a crash course in flash video • It just works. Nothing beats Flash for ubiquity. With a 98.7% penetration rate for video-enabled player versions 7 and higher, no special codecs or plugins to download, and fully crossplatform compatibility, Flash is the clear winner in transparency and ease of use. Since Flash Video players can be skinned so easily, it’s not always clear that you’re viewing a Flash Video file. There’s one easy way to find out, however. If you right-click (or Control-click on a Mac) on the video playing in your browser, and the dialog box says “About Adobe Flash Player . . . ” you know that it’s Flash. (See Figure 1 for an example.) How Do I Encode FLVs? There are many options for encoding video into the FLV format. The commercial-grade solutions are as follows: • Sorensen Squeeze Figure 2 (far left). Using the FLVPlayback Component in a SWF to play back an FLV. Figure 3 (center). The Components panel menu. Figure 4 (near left). Using the FLVPlayback component in Flash CS3. The only potential downside to using these new tools is that they require Flash Player 9 to view. As of this writing, however, the penetration of this version is up to 83.4% (according to Adobe) and growing daily. Adobe also has an Express Install feature available for you to implement, which makes the upgrade quick and seamless for most visitors. • On2 Flix Pro • Adobe Flash Video Encoder Why Would I Want to Use Flash Video? Why choose Flash Video over other video formats for your project? There are a few good reasons: • Good video quality. Sure, proponents of other video formats say their format has Flash Video beat. However, when encoded well, the quality is quite good and is even being adopted for highquality movie trailers and full-length online features. Besides, most viewers don’t expect HD-quality video over the web (though Flash Video can deliver near HD-quality at high bit rates). • Interactivity. Buttons, overlays, dynamic features, user-applied bookmarks, playlists—all of these things can be programmed into a Flash Video player. Anything you can do in Flash you can add into a video application. Try that with RealPlayer, QuickTime, or Windows Media. Even with the introduction of Microsoft’s Silverlight for video and interactivity, Flash still offers a much richer toolset for developers today. 48 STREAMING MEDIA August/September 2007 These applications are available for both PC and Mac, and offer a full set of features. You can add cue points, enter custom metadata, set up encoding profiles, and much more with these applications. Sorensen Squeeze and On2 Flix Pro are very similar in functionality and encoding speed, but offer some specific benefits that may sway you to choose one over the other. Squeeze has robust batch encoding and profiling, for example, and On2 is slightly less expensive. Both offer two-pass encoding, which gives you better overall quality and file size optimization than single-pass encoding. The Adobe Flash Video Encoder, which ships with the Flash authoring tool, only offers single-pass encoding but can be fine for most small-scale video projects. For those just getting started with Flash Video, or those who have a limited budget, there is a free tool called RIVA encoder that allows you to transcode AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, and WMV formats into FLV. Unfortunately RIVA encoder is only available for Windows, and it encodes using single-pass encoding. But, hey, you can’t beat the price!

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Streaming Media - August/September 2007

Table of Contents Sweet Sixteen Letters to the Editor Technology and Business Trends IBM Takes Webcasting to the Desktop ROI in the EDU Bank Serves Espresso, Enterprise Video Online Video Advertising: Hit or Miss MLB’s Foul Bawl A Crash Course in Flash Video Newspapers in Multimedia Metamorphosis Webcasting Large Entertainment Events: Seeing Through the Hype Webcasting With Windows Media Can’t Start A Fire . . . A WiMAX Primer Mobile Video at Last Telestream Episode Pro Grass Valley ProCoder 3 Silverlight Is No Flash Killer

Streaming Media - August/September 2007

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