It's rare these days that a day goes by where we don't find ourselves working video into one of our online projects. Flash video (FLV) is our format of choice for embedded (it is really the ubiquitous choice thanks to the good folks at YouTube) and we built our own online conversion engine (affectionately named "FLVme.com") about 2 years ago. We recently upgraded FLVme to use the H264 codec to encode videos and the results have been amazing....

We use FLVme.com to automatically convert any type of video (Quicktime, Windows Media, etc..) into Flash Video. It essentially works like YouTube, but we have full control over the content and the conversion recipe we use (a luxury you don't get with YouTube or the like). It comes in really handy in any of our applications that require video conversion (blogs, extranets, etc..). We can brand the video player as well, something our clients really appreciate.

Until now, FLVme has been encoding videos using H263 and we had been reasonably pleased with the results. A new project that we're working on for Cineflix has allowed us to tweak the FLVme engine and the results have been really encouraging. We are developing an online screening room for Cineflix that will allow their existing and potential clients to login and few full length episodes. Cineflix produces some really amazing shows and we wanted to showcase that in the screening room using the highest possible quality videos - but not at the expense of download time. Enter H264.

Here is a quick before and after. The first image shows a video compressed with the old FLVme recipe using H263 (with mono audio), while the second is our new and improved recipe that uses the H264 codec (with stereo sound).

We were blown away with the results. There was a dramatic difference in image and sound quality (easily 2-3 times better) with virtually no penalty in terms of file size (~90MB with H263 and ~100MB with H264).

Drawbacks? There are two.

1. It now takes FLVme about 2.5 times longer to encode videos.
2. H264 encoded FLVs are only supported with Flash Player 9 and higher (installed on 98.8% of browsers though, according to Adobe)

We'll gladly accept those trade-offs for the major boost in image and sound quality!

 

Bryan Mahoney - Bryan is Dynamo's Director of Technology, continually breaking new ground evaluating, developing and guiding our sites and webapps, & a pillar in Dynamo's client service front. Co-author of 2 early books on the integration of ColdFusion and Flash, he is an expert in database driven content management and design. Bryan now principally rides Ruby on Rails.