Flash Video: Universal Video Codec?
on 10.19.06, 09:11am in media • comments (3)
I used to hate flash. But now I love it.
Why? Flash Video (flv) has provided me with a solution to my own personal codec hell.
Since I’ve been posting videos to the web for my extended family to see, I would just encode my home movies in Windows Media Video (wmv) format. My main reason for this was to simplify my workflow since most of my friends and family had Windows XP (or even Windows 98) on their machines. Every once in a while though, someone would have a codec problem: video wouldn’t display, audio wouldn’t work, etc. After a while, it started to become an endless support nightmare for me.
Then people I knew started getting macs. While Flip4Mac works pretty well, there always seemed to be some sort of problem.
I finally decided to check out the solution that YouTube, Google Video and MSN Soapbox all have: I started to encode personal videos in flash. Using free tools (ffmpegx and flvplayer), I’ve now have a codec that works on everything from PC’s to Macs to Linux to Smartphones and PDA’s. So far it’s been working wonderfully (Note: If you’re curious, here’s more information on encoding video with ffmpegx).
Part of me also wonders if the future of mobile video and Opt-In Television revolves around flash, instead of H.264 or mpeg-4.
Ken Partridge (October 19, 2006 @ 10:42 am)
Sigh, we had been serving up mp3s forever straight with a link and also through iTunes.
Out new boss complained everyday, he just wanted the audio to just start playing on his computer, no matter what we did , on his computer there was ALWAYS a problem.
So we just are using the odeo player and we are making our own flash control to server up mp3s.
Our new media player will be flash based. Imagine that.
Grover Saunders (October 20, 2006 @ 10:09 am)
I couldn’t agree more. Flash video “just works”. We encourage all of our customers to publish in Flash video.
Antonio (October 24, 2006 @ 8:04 am)
Thing is…Flash isi good, but there are so many different content providers offering up some sort of WMV, it’s a necessity to have Flip4Mac with a Mac. Most of the time it works flawlessly, but there are certain weird formats that make it choke.