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I am wondering how many of you have switched over to flash video instead of Media Player and QuickTime? Right now, all of our content is in Media Player and QuickTime 150/500, along with a downloadable Mpeg for the first week that our content is live. But based on the fact that we have so many formats to encode for, I am just thinking about changing over to Flash and wanted to get other opinions about this.
Thanks!
BoyNation
We are going to add Flash in the next incarnation of our content management system, but we will probably retain some other media type (possibly quicktime, switching to that from windows media) as well.
pretty much every new free hosted video gallery we put out is flash, its very well accepted and we are working on flash videos in our members sites too. Thankfully, the techies at NatNet have a cheap (and a free) solution to make this possible without having to buy flash media server!
cheers,
Luke
Well that's a nice tidbit to know!Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilihost
yeah, now that youtube and such have forced flash on 99.9% of all users systems, it works out rather well...and flash quality is so nice too.
I use Flash video. I got so tired of all of the glitches with WMV and Firefox. Luke put me onto a convert "Flash Video MX" that was cheap and easy to use. I love it.
Michael
"Flash Video MX" is also cheap and they support it with new versions every few months that tweak codecs or improve quality. Its a real "must own" product for anyone working in flash.
I'm curious what the difference is between having a Flash media server and simply having Flash content on a regular Apache server... our DVD studio site is serving Flash videos from a regular Linux/Apache box, and we don't seem to be having any issues with it, so I've been trying to get a clear answer as to what the difference is, and haven't been able to figure much out... does anyone have any info?Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilihost
flash server is mainly for on-the-fly video conversions and development environments. There are ways to stream flash video properly without it (even streaming it that allows ff, rewind and jumping around).
we are currently working on switching over to flash only streams... too many problems with vista, DRM and wmv ...
I'm using Flash, too.
One of the reasons I re-built MuscleBearCub.com with Joomla was to allow the switch to Flash.
I wish they would create a Flash plug-in for Site Depth, though...
We are happy with our Flash Media Server. Luke is partially correct, because the on the fly conversions are one of the small abilities of Flash Media Server. From what I understand from our Flash guys if you aren't using Flash Media Server then you are doing a progressive download of the file, rather than a true stream.
If someone is savvy enough they could save the .flv file that you are serving to them. Adobe has already announced that they are coming out with an FLV player for FREE. This could now be a big drawback to those people that are not doing a true stream. Even Youtube does progressive download.
Lisa, you can do a true stream, the NatNet techies know how to do this (something to do with special scripts and codecs and such). I didn't get all the details but if your techies are smart I am sure they can figure it out too.
cheers,
Luke
You know, that's why I only peddle the porn.... :)
Flash is a wonderful thing though and we've had great success with our DogGoneVideo.com VOD site which is all streamed using FLASH and our Flash Media Server. What we offer has been totally developed in-house over the last 5 years.
The studios feel safer and the customer feedback has been tremendous!
As far as a FLASH live broadcast, it blows Emulive away. We have several of our model / porn star sites that use our Firefeed technology for their live shows and chats.
Doesn't Flash video have a file size limit that restricts it from showing long and/or high quality videos?
Absolutely not! Your only limitation would be the size of your hard drive and having room for the file, if a download.
Lisa is correct, I don't know of any file size limitations either!
Ah cool. It must have just been a limitation on the conversion program I was using... Wildform.Quote:
Originally Posted by lisa
Yep, if you are doing progressive download, the end user can still keep the .flv and play it with virtually any Flash Player. True Flash streaming can protect that, and if you do some MD5 with the player itself, you should be able to limit the streaming link from being broadcast out beyond your subscriber.Quote:
Originally Posted by lisa
A good option would be to offload delivery to a Content Delivery Network (CDN), so all storage, licensing costs and hardware would be included in the price - you would just need to encode in Flash and the CDN does the rest.
Streaming Flash can end up costing less than progressive download as well -depending on whether your customers watch the whole video or just part of it.
And a good CDN, will have transcoding services included...or something like Flip4Mac has a good transcoding engine.
(We actually use the same network that delivers Flash for YouTube and ABC Television - keeps our costs down)