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Video via the Web

Posted on 20 Dec 2005 at 12:24

Kevin Partner explains how best to broadcast your video to the world

The only significant change since version 4 is the addition of On2's Flash 8 video codec, so the case for an existing user to upgrade at a cost of about £84 inc VAT will depend on whether they want to exploit the higher compression ratio and better quality of the On2 codec, at the price of limiting the audience for their video until Player 8 becomes ubiquitous.

If you're happy with its range of presets, Flix Pro is easy enough to use and you can carry out the entire process from the front tab. Browse for the raw video file and Flix will suggest a suitable name for the output file, based on what export format you've specified (which range from an SWF format compatible with all versions of Flash from 3 onwards right up to the latest Flash 8 FLV). Frankly, support for Flash 3 is of little practical use nowadays when almost 99 per cent of all browser users have the Flash 5 Player or higher (as of September 2005) and 93 per cent have version 7.

Having selected one of the 31 presets, there's nothing more to do than to click the Encode button and sit back and watch Flix Pro grind away. Flix is the only product I know that offers an optional two-pass encoding method to improve the quality of the end result, at the expense of a longer encoding process. The Vid/Aud tab allows you to specify the FLV's output dimensions, frame rate and audio sampling rate. If you're creating an SWF rather than an FLV, you can have Flix Pro automatically begin playback, launch a URL and even specify preloader text. Flix Pro includes an 'adaptive' preloader that takes into account the user's connection speed, along with controls for manually specifying how much of the SWF should download before it begins to play.

Flix Pro can also convert your FLV or SWF to a self-playing Projector for Windows, Mac and Linux - it generates the appropriate HTML to host the SWF file and even adds a player bar in any of a range of styles. Finally, on the editing side, Flix Pro allows you to crop your video and set in and out points, so you only encode the appropriate portion. It also offers an excellent batch-processing facility, where, once you've set up one clip, those settings are automatically applied to all the clips in the batch - simply open the batch-processing dialog, drag-and-drop source files from Windows Explorer, click Process and leave Flix to get on with its job. Despite its higher price compared with the slicker-looking SWiSH Video2, Flix Pro represents better value in my view, unless your requirements are limited. Flix is also supplied in a Standard edition (approx £38 inc VAT), which doesn't include two-pass video encoding and is roughly functionally equivalent to the SWiSH product, although less easy to use.

The only serious competitor to Flix Pro is Sorenson's Squeeze (www.sorensonmedia.com), which is available in two versions: one for converting to Flash formats, and the Compression Studio, which converts to a wide range of formats including QuickTime and MPEG. The Flash-only version costs about £67 inc VAT, placing it between SWiSH Video2 and Flix Pro. However, if you want to use the On2 VP6 codec, you'll need to pay an extra £112 or so for the appropriate plug-in. The Squeeze interface is reminiscent of low-end video-editing packages and barely manages to stay the right side of tackiness: it's better-looking and easier to use than Flix, and it includes the facility to capture video directly from a digital camcorder. You can then apply basic filters to this video and set in and out points, but in the majority of cases you'll want to prepare your video in a dedicated editing program before bringing it into Squeeze.