I'm wondering if I should encode video using Sorensen so it can run on 7, or
are most Flash Players now version 8? I remember a web page that gave info on
what versions of Flash Player most people had. Does anyone know of one out
there.

I'd really appreciate any comments about if people will have difficulty
viewing Flash 8 video due to outdated players. I'd hate to use the latest
version and then nobody be able to use it. Is Flash 7's video encoder markedly
inferior?

Thanks

Flash Player 8 has not been out long enough to have a very wide penetration
... but that will improve. However, if your site aims at (say) corporate or
government people, then they are often slow on updating to newer players due
to the software updating for workstations being centrally controlled, and it
tech guys go for the "better the devil you know" approach and tend to delay
updating software.

If you have FP7 or earlier, then you cannot view a movie published for SWF8
... not only won't videos using ON2 show, even things like static text will
not appear (as SWF8 uses some new tags for text that FP7 doesn't understand)

In general ON2/FP8 video is better quality especially for smaller videos.
However, the quality can very heavily depend on which video compression
program you use. The one in Flash is fairly basic, there are other ones
that do multi-pass encoding and can achieve much better quality for the same
file size.

Of course, if file size for your video is not an issue (e.g. it is on a CD),
then if you go for highest quality, both On2 and Sorenson will give good
results .. its just the on2 will most likely give you smaller file size
(assumption).
--
Jeckyl

Thanks Jeckyl,

I really appreciate your thorough response. It was really helpful. Do you
happen to know of the Macromedia page that might show what percentage of
computers have which version of the player installed? Also, can you recommend a
good 3rd party compressor? Thanks again.

do a Google to find avi -> swf converts (most of which handle other formats
as well).

look at Flix, Sorenson squeeze, SWiSHvideo, there's quite a few. Most will
also have trial periods, so you can fiddle with the settings.

HOWEVER .. BE WARNED: I have used some compressor where you specify the
bitrate and you end up with something MUCH bigger than what you should (ie
much higher bitrate) .. so it LOOKS like its producing better quality, but
really its not .. its cheating. So look at the quality AND the resultant
file size, not just at what you think you are telling it to do !!!
--
Jeckyl

I have been wondering about the Flash 8 penetration issue, because
after encoding a movie for a client with ON2, going with the Sorensen
Spark codec was just painful.

I normally have done flash work a version or two behind in most cases,
because the new features didn't trump accessability in those cases, for
the most part. However, didn't Flash 7 come with an auto-update
feature? While this is something that can be disabled, I would venture
to say that easily the great majority of users with the flash 7 player
never disabled this feature. So if Flash 7 currently has a penetration
of 87%-93% (according to MM), wouldn't this mean that Flash 8
penetration is (because of the auto-update) nearly at the same rate by
now?

Maybe I am just looking for excuses to never have to export as 7 and
have to pass up on all the great new features 8 has, but I have a
feeling we might get a surprise with the flash 8 penetration numbers,
once those are finally available.

hey Jeckyl - here's a stumper for you... I have a 5.8 MB .MOV that I need
converted to FLV. I've tried all 3 means of conversion - the QT component,
Flash Video Encoder, and Flash 8 (which are all the same thing I reckon), but
no matter what I do, I end up with my 5.8 MB .MOV as a 22 MB . FLV

have you encountered a problem like this?

Nothing really a stumper at all.

It depends on your settings and how compressed the movie was originally.
There is NO reason to expect FLV compressed movie to be any smaller than any
other codec. Indeed .. whenever you recompress a movie, you will lose
quality .. so unless you have very high quality video to start with, you do
not get good results re quality vs file size when recompressing to FLV (or
recompressing to any other format for that matter :)).

To really tell whether you're getting reasonable compression figures, you
need to look at the size of the movie (width x height) and the number of
frames (frame rate * duration). Multiply these to get the total number of
pixels, and multiply that by 3 to get number of bytes. Then see how big
that is compared to the compressed movie.

What you're seeing sounds quite likely and not an indication of anything
going wrong.
--
Jeckyl