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Old 01-21-2011, 10:56 AM  
AJHall
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Join Date: Nov 2002
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Elevated X uses one of the most widely used flash players (the JW Player) which is not something we developed. When a video loads in the default CMS flash player it shows the pre-loading animation with numbers showing the % that the video is loaded. It does this up to the point that it starts to play. You don't see this animation repeatedly as it rebuffers because it's not trying to "download" the video but play it, it just bottlenecks. I'll see if there's another version of the player or a way for it to show a rebuffer %.

You mention streaming but your description sounds a lot like a progressive download, not a stream. If you're not using a true streaming solution (we suggest Wowza as an affordable method) your flash videos will buffer and rebuffer while playing anytime an end user's connection speed is slower than our buffer/max buffer settings for the encoded video.

Unfortunately as blackcrow hinted at, there's no magical number that produces best results. Video quality and playback is highly subjective and what 1 person is happy with, another won't be.

Our suggested steps are:
1) Make sure you have a true streaming solution in place
2) Start with a video of 1280 and try to encode with a bitrate of 4000, buffer/max buffer of 5500.
3) If you're not happy with playback, follow blackcrow's advice and slowly reduce the bitrate by 300-500k and re-encode and do this until you reach an acceptable quality/playback level.

You could also offer more than 1 size of streaming flash video: 1 for those with fast connections or willing to deal with more load time for a 1920 HQ or HD file and a 2nd that's 1280, 960 or 720 for other users.

Give that a shot.

Anytime you have questions like this feel free to contact us directly for support and we'll be happy to help.

AJ
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