Flash Videos
 

what settings do you use when converting from a ripped DVD to display a FLV in the members area?

I prefer f4v to the older flv codecs. Better quality at matching bitrates.

Bitrate is going to depend on your delivery/streaming options of course.

Most of the time I will try to make a 600-800k stream for slower connects... and something in the 1.5 to 2mb stream for standard connects.

The next consideration is development/production time. You can run single pass encodes at a constant bitrate all day long relatively quickly depending on your render/server rig... but a 2 pass or more encode using variable bitrate will leave you with far less artifacting, and smoother playback.

Audio settings at least for porn you can typically use pretty standard settings... I haven't seen the necessity for a 160k audio stream of screams and moans.

Thanx, I got some back that were in f4v and they worked really good, nice clear and clean which is of course what I want, thanx again for the info

Keep in mind that F4V is the Flash-specific wrapper for H.264, along with proper metadata for playback with or without a streaming server. An H.264 video in an MP4 container with Flash-specific metadata will also work, and can serve as the fallback media for users who don't have Flash (iPad/iPhone, etc.), or have it disabled. That is, the one file will work with Flash, Quicktime, VLC player, HTML5 on Safari and Chrome, and so on.

You can use SWFObject plus some additional custom JavaScript to steer users to the proper file type. (Use NoScript for those with JS turned off, and just provide a link to the MP4 file.)

With three million iPads sold in three months, fallback to HTML5 is becoming a good idea. There are plenty of blogs and Websites that provide the page coding you can use, and if you do it starting out, you don't have to go back and change out pages later on down the road.

My :2 cents::2 cents: worth, and also echoing munki's excellent comments.

Thank you for the comments. Things to be added. I'm just getting the site up, then adding more formats as I go. I'm planning one useing flowplayer for the flash, then have wmv, m4v and maybe quick time. Once I get that up, I'll look at html5 for ipads. I have some old dvd's that I got permission to use of Briana and they don't convert as well as the newer ones. I've been testing the m4v's on my black berry storm and they look great. Soon after the site is running, we'll be getting into production of new video of Briana.

Then based on that, you really only need two video formats: H.264 in some universal container (i.e. mp4, or m4v, whatever you want to call it) and WMV. The H.264 content goes in the mp4 file. It will be playable in Flash*, Quicktime, VLC, and under HTML5 in iPad, Safari, and Chrome.

The WMVs are still a good choice, especially for downloadable content. You might consider offering a Silverlight player option for the WMVs, instead of, or in addition to, allowing downloading. There are a number of open source Silverlight players that are pretty good.

*Bear in mind that H.264 support is limited to Adobe Flash Player 9 version 3 and later. Most people have this, but for those with an earlier version they'll need to upgrade. Flowplayer itself requires Flash 9 or above, and you can include an extra check in the Flowplayer code for update 3 like this:

$f("player", {src: 'flowplayer.swf', version: [9, 115]}, {
// configuration
});

More on the Flowplayer site. If users have an earlier version, you can either require them to go with WMV, or fall back to a third version of the videos in FLV/VP6 format. This is how YouTube does it.