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Great idea, but the quality is awful--not at all surprising, given that you're using a video format dating from the late 90s (Flash Video 1, a slightly modified

Great idea, but the quality is awful--not at all surprising, given that you're using a video format dating from the late 90s (Flash Video 1, a slightly modified version of the decade-old H.263 format). "Looking like Youtube" is not a compliment in 2008. High quality at reasonable bitrates in Flash isn't difficult; you just need to use x264. ( 280kbps example: http://norp.ath.cx/h264.html http://norp.ath.cx/h264.html ) Quality has improved quite a bit since that sample was made, too: http://i35.tinypic.com/rk33wx.png http://i35.tinypic.com/rk33wx.png (screenshot from 400kbps encode). There's a reason a huge number of sites, both small startups to companies as large as Facebook, are switching to x264. Drop by #x264 if you need more information; we're there to help. And if you need something more in-depth, I do contracts, too...

a4agarwal 18y ago
Thanks for the tip! I just switched our codec to x264 and we saw a quality improvement. I'm also playing around with higher bitrates, we definitely want the video on Posterous to look good.
- DarkShikari 18y ago
  Note that if you're using ffmpeg (which seems to be popular for Flash video encoding), you have to be very very careful with encoding settings because it uses rather bizarre defaults for x264, forcing you to re-specify all the existing ones to get it to work ideally. Fortunately, there's useful guides on that too: http://ffmpeg.x264.googlepages.com/mapping http://ffmpeg.x264.googlepages.com/mapping http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful-stuff/ffmpeg-x264-encoding-guide/ http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful-stuff/ffmpeg-x264-enc... The first link is useful even if you're not using ffmpeg, since it has a relatively good explanation for what most of the options do. And if you still need more quality, drop by our IRC.
  - rantfoil 18y ago
    This is fantastic. Thanks for the link and the advice. Talk about being helpful... I'd like to +10 karma on DarkShikari's account.

a4agarwal 18y ago

Thanks for the tip! I just switched our codec to x264 and we saw a quality improvement. I'm also playing around with higher bitrates, we definitely want the video on Posterous to look good.

DarkShikari 18y ago
Note that if you're using ffmpeg (which seems to be popular for Flash video encoding), you have to be very very careful with encoding settings because it uses rather bizarre defaults for x264, forcing you to re-specify all the existing ones to get it to work ideally. Fortunately, there's useful guides on that too: http://ffmpeg.x264.googlepages.com/mapping http://ffmpeg.x264.googlepages.com/mapping http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful-stuff/ffmpeg-x264-encoding-guide/ http://rob.opendot.cl/index.php/useful-stuff/ffmpeg-x264-enc... The first link is useful even if you're not using ffmpeg, since it has a relatively good explanation for what most of the options do. And if you still need more quality, drop by our IRC.
- rantfoil 18y ago
  This is fantastic. Thanks for the link and the advice. Talk about being helpful... I'd like to +10 karma on DarkShikari's account.