flash 7 video is teh suck
There! I said it, and I’m glad I did. However, Flash 7’s “Spark” video format is unfortunately the basis of what you’ll see on YouTube and Google Video — and both services suffer greatly from blurry, pixelated video as a result. For me, both services border on the unwatchable.
The real shame is that video in Flash 8 is so much better. Check out this side-by-side comparison. The moral of the story is: if you have to do video for the web in Flash, insist on encoding it using Flash 8’s “VP6″ codec. Or even better, encode it using QuickTime 7’s industry-standard H.264 codec, which is also killer. And, most importantly, do not encode your video in Windows Media format or Real format, as those formats have been implicated by an international consortium of video experts to cause cancer.
~jeff
February 13th, 2006 at 10:33 am
i absolutely 100% agree with you.
February 15th, 2006 at 9:43 am
[...] Link to Kelsey Flynn’s Cliff Notes’ summary of “Brokeback Mountain”; video in Flash 8 format as per our earlier discussion. I did the soundtrack, and in case for some weird reason reason you didn’t pick up the reference, the fuzzy-guitar+tremolo-surf soundtrack is a direct homage to Neil Young’s incredibly sparse and textural soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man“. [...]
February 16th, 2006 at 11:00 am
… well, that’s pretty weird.
February 16th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Yeah, that appears when somebody somewhere links to a post; even if we ourselves link to our own posts. It’s weird.
April 12th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
I do agree that Flash 7 video blows. BUT there is a workaround I found using Sorenson Squeeze. Using the VP6_CD compression settings and the Spark Pro codec(1000vbr/2pass/image smoothing) I was able to remove nearly all of the pixelation/shitiness. Yay for Squeeze!