Flash or Windows media?

[Brandon_D]

Hi All
I went searching a bit and really couldn't find an end all, be all answer in this forum, so I thought I'd pop it out. If there is already a question and answer to this, I am sorry. Maybe someone can point out the link for me.

Any whooo, here goes.
I am building a membership site. At this point in time I have almost 300 exclusive movies at aprox 1 hour each that I have for content.

I am under the impression that going with flash for my movies within my site for my customers to view is the way to go for many reasons. One being that it is pretty tough for the average user to capture the vid permantly.
The other being that FLV files are much smaller in size than other formats like Windows media and quick time files. This will definately help me out with bandwidth.

I am having one heck of a time with Premire and it's flash. I am able to render out to a FLV file, but can not play it within Adobes flash player. I have to use a third party flash player.

As I really dont want to make my members down load a flash player I am at a quandry here.

As it stands right now, all my videos are in .AVI format and ready to be rendered out to the proper format.

Also, should I offer iPod downloads for my clients?

Can any one offer any suggestions on what I should do here?

I am open to any thoughts.

Thanx again.

Brandon D. Steele
Steele Shot Pictures
SteeleShot

[CaroMark]

Hello Brandon D,

I have forwarded the link to your thread onto on Engineer in charge of streaming for a response!

[CaroMark]

"FLV files can be served up by Apache and IIS by adding a MIME type of application/octet stream."

If you would like to know more about what we could offer you at Caro.Net then please hit me up directly and I can see about setting up some form of direct contact with our engineer for you.

[testpie]

Hi All
I went searching a bit and really couldn't find an end all, be all answer in this forum, so I thought I'd pop it out. If there is already a question and answer to this, I am sorry. Maybe someone can point out the link for me.

Any whooo, here goes.
I am building a membership site. At this point in time I have almost 300 exclusive movies at aprox 1 hour each that I have for content.

I am under the impression that going with flash for my movies within my site for my customers to view is the way to go for many reasons. One being that it is pretty tough for the average user to capture the vid permantly.
The other being that FLV files are much smaller in size than other formats like Windows media and quick time files. This will definately help me out with bandwidth.

I am having one heck of a time with Premire and it's flash. I am able to render out to a FLV file, but can not play it within Adobes flash player. I have to use a third party flash player.

As I really dont want to make my members down load a flash player I am at a quandry here.

As it stands right now, all my videos are in .AVI format and ready to be rendered out to the proper format.

Also, should I offer iPod downloads for my clients?

Can any one offer any suggestions on what I should do here?

I am open to any thoughts.

Thanx again.

Brandon D. Steele
Steele Shot Pictures
SteeleShot

Just embed JW FLV Player and as long as your members have the Flash plugin installed (I seem to recall something like 97-99% of web surfers having a version of Flash installed as a plugin), it'll play your FLV-encoded content.

[CocoBongo]

man I just did this hit me up on icq if you like I will be more then happy to walk you throw this free of charge...

[D Ghost]

Flash, it's seamless and everyone has it. It just works.

[raymor]

Flash, it's seamless and everyone has it. It just works.

It works for 85% of people and gives the bird to the other 15%.
More and more people can't use Flash as most new computers come with
64 bit processors. Although for years Adobe has been promising a 64 bit Flash
"real soon now", they haven't released one and there's no indication that
they will this year or next. Intel released their first 32 bit processors in 2001,
AMD in 2003. Windows went 64 bit in 2005 and still there's no Flash player
for these platforms 3-7 years later. About 8.5% of internet users use Mac or
Linux on their desktops and Flash sucks on both of these platforms, even
for the few left running 32 bit. Overall, probably 15% of users today have
run systems for which there is no solid Flash support. I sure as hell wouldn't
throw away 15% of my customers if I was you! There is a way to support
ALL platforms and also use Flash if you want, though.

As far as size versus quality, the current version of Flash, Windows Media,
and Quicktime all use versions of MPEG4 under the hood. There are minor
differences because Quicktime was released before the MPEG4 standard
was finalized and because Microsoft's policy is to always support only their
own "modified" versions of all standards, but they are all quite similar
being based on MPEG4 and so will give very similar quality and filesize
given the same settings are used.

Because the "different" formats are all MPEG4 variations, pretty much any
system, including a cell phone or a DVD player, can play plain standard MPEG4.
Providing the videos in standard MPEG4 as one option, then, makes your
site usuable for all customers. You can also have the same movies available
in other formats, but plain mpeg4 will work for everyone. Rather than using
another format, though, you can also use either Flash or Windows Media
Player (or both) to embed the exact same MPEG4 video. Since Flash 9,
Flash will play a standard format MPEG4 file (H.264 ISO 14496-12).
So you upload one file and it plays anywhere, for anyone, through a Flash
embed on your page, a Windows Media Player plugin, or their favorite
video player. In fact, this is exactly what some of Adobe's own techs advise
you to do. Tinic Uro, one of the Adobe engineers working on video support
in Flash, wrote about this on his blog a couple times.

[Brandon_D]

Flash vs. WM

you guys ROCK
Let me go through all these options and I'll hit everyone up soon.
thanx again
Brandon D. Steele
SteeleShot
Pictures

[softwareguy]

Use my software here: easyflv.com - I am offering a 50% discount here: easyflv.com/discount.php

Advantages
==========
#1 Clickable videos: Vidoes can be made clickable with your own URL or hyperlink. Which means you can embed an affiliate link in tthe videos. Your website visitors can actually click your videos to go to a new website or webpage.

#2 Redirection after completion of video: When your video completes users can be redirected to a different webpage or a different website with a URL or hyperlink defined by you. Again you can use this for affiliate marketing. That is redirect using your affiliate link.

#3 Introductory image or picture: People do not like autoplaying of videos on the webpages. So you can easily place an image or advertisement at the start of each video to increase your website revenue. Again, this picture is clickable and your visitor can click this picture (if they do not want to watch the video) and launch to a different webpage or website.

#4 Guaranteed view of your video players: In any browser. Even in Internet Explorer your visitors won't face "Click here to activate control" that is a total turn off for most.

#5 Conversion of almost all video formats: Converts virtually any video format to FLV including DVDs. The other supported formats are MPEG, AVI, WMV (Windows Media), MOV (Quick Time mainly in Handycams or DVcams), RM (Real Media), 3GP (Mobile phone videos), DivX and etc.

#6 Batch conversion: The batch FLV converter can process 100s of video files in various formats to FLV without any user interaction and thus saving your time to convert one by one manually.

#7 User defined conversion criterias: There are the industry standard conversion criterias given for you to choose from for conversion of your videos. BUT perfectionists require more specific figures. So you can set your own values and can save them. For example if you want a video to be converted at 350 Kbps - thats industry standard and given in the software. However if you want it should be 337 Kbps you can just set it on the software and save it as a profile.

#8 FLV Watermarker: The watermarker software can BRAND a video of yours with a text or a domain name. Next time you upload a video to youtube you might like this feature, not only it protects your video but people get to know from which domain it is originating from!

Enjoy!

[jackNpepsi]

Flash hands down.

[MetrixApps - Jack]

Check out www.metrixplayer.com

Licensing includes:

- Scene Selection
- White Label on each player (site name/logo) on the player itself.
- Detailed reporting on time consumption and bandwidth usage per video
clip (scene)
- H264, VP6-S & VP6-E codec compatibility
- Load Balancing: Scalable to unlimited servers for optimum member experience.
- Allows you to utilize "your existing" servers. (Don't need to
upgrade to expensive streaming servers).
- Web based: content upload / scene thumbnail upload / edit scene descriptions
- White Label Feeds Engine

contact: [email protected]

[skrinkladoo]

Flash - works best multi platform.

[u-Bob]

It works for 85% of people and gives the bird to the other 15%.
More and more people can't use Flash as most new computers come with
64 bit processors. Although for years Adobe has been promising a 64 bit Flash
"real soon now", they haven't released one and there's no indication that
they will this year or next. Intel released their first 32 bit processors in 2001,
AMD in 2003. Windows went 64 bit in 2005 and still there's no Flash player
for these platforms 3-7 years later. About 8.5% of internet users use Mac or
Linux on their desktops and Flash sucks on both of these platforms, even
for the few left running 32 bit. Overall, probably 15% of users today have
run systems for which there is no solid Flash support. I sure as hell wouldn't
throw away 15% of my customers if I was you! There is a way to support
ALL platforms and also use Flash if you want, though.

BS.

<----- running a 64bit windows and flash works just fine.

[CIVMatt]

easyflv fucking rocks

[evofuse]

Flash offers a better experience. No downloads mean fewer clicks and less time to get paid.

Evo/

[brandonstills]

Flash. WMV is poorly supported on Mac. For downloads offer numerous formats.

[mozadek]

Cant go wrong with flash