New Flash video

By Jason Meserve, NetworkWorld.com, 12/06/04

Finally got a chance to play around with Flash Video for a video slideshow I did on installing an EMC Clariion AX100 SAN server.

There were a bunch of ways to do the slideshow, including using Photo Story for Windows XP, but I wanted to try out Flash Video since our service provider (Speedera) is now offering Flash streaming and I wanted to test the Flash Video Toolkit that provides integration with Dreamweaver 2004.

First, I developed the slideshow itself in Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus from a combination of photos that were taken at EMC and audio narration that I recorded myself using SoundForge. From Studio, I created an AVI file that was fed through Sorenson Squeeze 4. I created the Flash Video (FLV) file and a Windows Media file with Squeeze (though it took a couple of codec tweaks to get the audio on the Windows Media file correct.) The Windows Media file I used as an alternative in case someone was having trouble with the Flash player.

Next, I used Dreamweaver, which I have very limited experience with, and the Flash Video Toolkit Extension to put the Flash video in an HTML page, complete with player controls. This is simple, since the Toolkit's dialog box walks you through the entire process. There's no need to use Flash MX 2004 itself. Upload a couple small SWF files to your Web site and the FLV file to the streaming server (Speedera) and you're good to go. My first attempt to get it play didn't work because I missed the step about uploading the SWF files. Now, when you visit the page with the video, it plays almost immediately after the page loads. There's no player pop-up or much of a need to worry if the proper version of Windows Media or Real Player is installed.

One downside to the Flash Video format versus the Windows Media version: Windows Media does a much better job at compressing the file size. Both formats were encoded for a target bitrate of 112K bit/sec. The FLV file came out at 3.34 M/bytes while the WMV weighed in at 1.95 M/bytes.

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