Re: Is flash video quicker to access on dialup?
- From: mark <mark2741@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:51:10 GMT
jurupari@xxxxxxx wrote:
I think I read somewhere that's the case, compared even to 2 or 3 meg .wmv files or whatever. Does anybody know anything quantitative about that, or whether it's even true?
thanks,
Clif
A couple of factors are at play here.
1 - the flashplayer loads the video files much faster than windows media player loads them in. Quicktime is quite fast, but not as fast as the Flashplayer. And it requires quicktime to load, which loads much slower than the flashplayer (which is instantaneous).
2 - the flashplayer plays a proprietary video format (.FLV). I don't believe that it achieves better quality-to-file size ratio yet compared to wmv or qt.
3 - the major factor is the server. FLV can be configured to stream almost instantly. You may have noticed this on ESPN.com with their "ESPN MOtion" video player (which is a flash-based set of controls that load in and stream FLV files as soon as you click on a video to watch). Compare that to what CNN.com uses, which is WMV and takes quite a bit of time to load, even on broadband. Not to mention the annoying commercials : )
FLV is *very* young. It has only been around since Flash v7 (2004) and has improved quite a bit with the recent release of flash v8 (last month). The quality is not at the level of quicktime yet. But when I used a PC (which was up until a week or so ago) I *hated* quicktime videos. On the Mac they are nice.
I have dabbled with using FLV in the past at work and plan to do some pretty soon for use on my personal website. The main thing about it is you really need a fast server (preferrably what is called a "streaming server"). Otherwise they are choppy.
As long as Adobe doesn't screw things up, I fully believe that FLV will be the best format to use within a year or two, if not already. It is cross-platform, does not require a client player that takes time to load or requires full loading before playing, and there are other technical reasons to use FLV (alpha transparency, the ability to advance to any part of the video right away, without having to watch the beginning, the ability to create your own controls/player for the user to use it with, and probably most importantly - the ability to incorporate it so easily within the flash authoring environment).
mark .
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