Flash for Video: So Popular, So Sucky

[Jason Dunn]

I was watching a clever video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) (90% of YouTube is boring, useless stuff, but 10% is great) and I was once again struck by how bad most Flash video looks. I can certainly understand why it's popular - odds are very high that the average user will have Flash installed on their PC, regardless of platform, so there's no need to install a Divx codec or something similar to watch a video. Flash is highly efficient when it comes to streaming, so videos start right away. The down side is that Flash video tends to look horrible. Every video on YouTube looks like a 150 kbps video stream that has been compressed six times over. The really sad thing is that I seem to be one of the few people that care about video quality, because Flash-based video is more popular than ever.

The question is, since I've never seen Flash video that looked good, is what I'm seeing a limitation of the format? Or poor decisions made by the people that are encoding it? It's only recently that I've seen Flash-based photo slideshows that looked great, so I'm leaning towards it being a weakness that Flash has when it comes to motion compression. Any Flash video experts out there want to set me straight?

[Vincent Ferrari]

Remember though that YouTube has to compress the crap out of something lest they not have enough bandwidth to serve all of it.

Audioblog uses Flash for their videos (if I remember correctly) and they look AWESOME when you play them back. I think it's more a product of where you're viewing it than any limitations on the format itself.

[Jason Dunn]

Remember though that YouTube has to compress the crap out of something lest they not have enough bandwidth to serve all of it.

Sure, but I have yet to see ANY Flash video that hasn't been compressed all to hell. I'm waiting for someone to show me a good one. :-)

[Vincent Ferrari]

Well, of course I can't find anyone with audioblog using the video (Chris Pirillo was for awhile and the quality was awesome), but I did remember seeing the video on the intro page for Flash (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/flashpro/) and it was really good.

My main complaint is that an FLV file is useless on a PocketPC... :-\

[jeffd]

Jason, I'm sure its possible if you don't set the compression level high, but it is most likely no where near as efficent as mpeg4, so people who set the compression level low see the huge file size and make it higher.

that said, while flash movie players and the media it plays are generaly worse off then normal streamed video quality wise, they do seem more reliable then those that rely on stream servers. I cant recall how many times I have clicked on a video link, have the player attempt to connect, and fail due to a vague error wich it cant tell me, but instead sends me to microsofts site saying it cant determine what error occured.

Also as mentioned, you can squeeze lower data rates out of flash video.. if not directly because of the fact that you can control the frame rate. Realvideo still does this, WMV used to, quicktime never did, but being able to lower frame rates to 15 and 10fps can save alot of data.

[mrwickham]

In the last version of Flash Macromedia changed their video encorder to On2 technology, which is much better. Check out their info at www.0n2.com

for an example of how it can look click this link for flash version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith trailer. This is the medium sized version. The site also has plenty of other video clips to view.

http://www.on2.com/video_samples/flix-video-samples/flash8gallery/?movie=mrssmith_450

So the short answer to your question is yes, flash can look as good and if not better than wmv, quicktime, or real if it is done right. The problem is it's not done right in the majority of cases.

[moyea]

Youtube videos are all flash video(flv),

Moyea flash video software (http://www.flash-video-mx.com) may help everyone.