Is Flash video more efficient than WMV or AVI?

[Raymond]

Alot of media are turning to flash to display their videos. Does flash movies use less bandwidth than traditional media types?

Actually I just saw it at this website, after converting a WMV to flash, the file size becomes significantly larger.

Any specific reason why people are switching? Thanks.

[Leosghost]

avi takes up more bytes than wmv for the same video ..

Flash takes up more than wmv ( but many many more people have the flash player installed ..and it is a much simpler and smaller install ) ..

There are many apps for shrinking the excess out of all image formats ..

Quicktime files are usually smaller than flash for the same definition ..and are used frequently for online tutorials because of this ..

But less people have the quicktime player installed ..

All depends on what you want to show people and who you want to show it to .

YMMV

[jtara]

But less people have the quicktime player installed ..

Lately, I've been absolutely unsuccessful at getting QuickTime to work on my Windows machine. I've un-installed and re-installed it to no avail. I click on a QT video, and the browser informs me it isn't installed. So, I don't bother if somebody has QT videos.

I think Yahoo recently switched to Flash Video. Whatever they used to use, never worked for me. Flash Video is a HUGE improvement. (As an aside, I have to say I am impressed with all of the recent "web 2.0" features on Yahoo.) Windows Media clips on CNN complain that I need Windows Media Player 9 and it "can't determine the version" that I have installed (even though I already have Windows Media Player 10...) The videos play just fine, though, if you ignore the annoying error messages.

My impression of Flash Video is that it "just works".

I wouldn't judge compression efficiency based on a conversion of a file with default settings. Almost all lossy compression schemes allow the user to determine the tradeoff between compression and quality, and there is no consistency in default settings between different codecs. I would try to avoid converting between formats in any case, as you are going to suffer from quality loss - better to go back to the original source, if you have it, in the highest quality you have available, and convert from there.

[shri]

Get the onflix two pass encoder software .. and learn the parameters. You can get some really good compression and quality out of it.

The freebie encoders with Flash is just "OK" .. not the best.

[Raymond]

Hi Shri, is flix pro the only software available to convert videos to Flash 8? Any others that can be considered?

I just tried swish to render a video. While not losing much quality, the file size of the resulting flash video is MUCH larger than WMV (3.2 megs versus 1.7 megs). If I were to make a video that is of similar file size of the original WMV, the video quality becomes extremely low.

How much better is Flash 8 compared to Flash 7?

[edited by: Raymond at 5:51 am (utc) on Nov. 3, 2006]

[shri]

Take a look at Sorenson's suite if you're looking for Flash 7 compatibility.

We eventually went with Flash 8, based on these stats by Adobe.

[adobe.com...]

[Harry]

Sorenson on Flash 8 does not produce crisp videos. But yeah, Flash is the way to go.

[Raymond]

I downloaded both the onflix encoder with and without Two-Pass encoding. I can't really see the difference in terms of video quality between the two. Two-pass tend to have a slightly larger file than without Two-pass.