Working with .FLV videos
SlideRocket currently supports .FLV video playback. As of this writing (August 23, 2007) the beta version of the Flash 9 Player supports HD video and hardware/multi-core acceleration so for best results you should make sure you have the latest version. You may encode your video in any manner you choose, as long as the output is a .FLV file. HD quality video playing over the Internet is a beautiful thing, and you can view slide #4 of this presentation for a sample. If you will be encoding HD video for SlideRocket, you will get the best results by using On2's VP6 codec. It's best to start with uncompressed HD video, and here's how to use the Flash Video Encoder to get great results:
- Set your Flash Video encoding profile to "Custom".
- Show advanced settings.
- You can set the start and end points of your .FLV output if you only want to encode part of the video.
- Set the video codec to "On2 VP6" and use the default Frame Rate and Key Frame Placement settings.
- Set the quality to "Custom" and we've been getting great results with a max data rate of 1,300 kilobits per second (again, please refer to slide #4 of this presentation to see if your connection supports this data rate).
- You may resize the video in order to balance quality with bandwidth requirements. Remember that SlideRocket's canvas is currently 800x600 pixels, and that the HD version of the Flash 9 Player will scale your video using hardware acceleration for best possible quality.
- We've been getting good results using the MP3 audio codec at 128 kilobits per second.
Remember to test your video on a few different computers and Internet connections in order to make sure that it will play smoothly for everyone. If you know the hardware and connection that you are delivering an important presentation on, you can optimize for that configuration even if won't play on the average machine.
