JESSEE007 — Sat, 14 May 2005 17:16:55 +0000

Is there ever a webmaster convention?

fifeclub — Fri, 13 May 2005 20:40:22 +0000

I still welcome discussion on this subject but I thought people could benefit from my investigations. I installed every x-to-flash encoder from download.com that was under $100.

Video to Flash Converter - crap

Video Master - bigger crap

Riva Encoder and Riva Producer Lite - looked very promising. Free FLV encoder works great and produced acceptable size file at descent quality. But to use FLV on web you need to use the Riva Producer Lite which is a very reasonable $30. Unfortunately I was completely unable to figure it out. So it could be a good product but I never got a usable example out of it.

Cinema Forge - Not as polished at Riva but it was intruging. My tests all cam out upside down but I assume there's a way to fix that. What's intriging is that it seems to convert to almost any concevable format too, including .asf, .mov, .ram, .wmv, and more.

But here's the surprise. Somebody posted a reply about Windows Media Encoder and then deleted their post (after I read it). So I decided to give it a try. Like the Real Producer, it is a totally free application. But that doesn't matter if the file encoding sucks so I gave it a shot. AWESOME! I got my 30 sec test to around 700K file size (320x240 15fps) and it looked great too. Better quality than any of my flash tests, especially with interlaced scanning. Quality and file size were right on par with Real Producer, however unlike the free version of Real Producer I could acually resize the dimensions too.

I still need to look in to how to integrate a .wmv file into a webpage but I'm edging in that direction, even though I was willing to spend money if I found a better product.

(yes, I hate Microsoft too, but what r u gonna do)

bja888 — Fri, 13 May 2005 03:05:01 +0000

I dont have an answer but I have a question related to yours. I hope you dont mind me piggy backing your thread.
I am getting good at a game that I play online often and I want to start posting video of my playing on a sub-domin of my website. Which video format is best (see fifeclub's question) only I have limited budget. Also should I consider playing it in a flash formt.
Dont be confused. I want play it as a .swf not through flash in a diffrent formt.