Signs Of Life – FLV video compression settings
I was reminded recently that despite some significant research time into FLV video compression and delivery for Signs Of Life, I’d never really summarised my findings.
After some good experiences with Sorenson compression in the old days I was intrigued to find that Macromedia’s current On2 compression now provides visibly better results. I was also used to the assumption that third party tools would always do a better job than Macromedia’s, so I gave a lot of time to the various codecs in Sorenson Spark, and to testing On2′s VP6 encoding.
To my pleasant surprise the best results I got came from the Macromedia FLV Exporter application that comes free with Flash. The only setting that needed tweaking was the ‘keyframes’. By default it’s set to ‘auto’ or ‘blank’, but I got fantastic results by setting it to 300 (a value I discovered was being set by a third party tool during other testing). I couldn’t find any useful rationale for this otherwise quirky number, but the results spoke for themselves.
Anyhoo, the final compression settings for the videos were:
Video – 225 Kbps, Audio – 96Kbps, Framerate – 25fps, Keyframe – every 300.
Flash video codec comparison – visual FAQ
Valuable side-by-side comparison of various Flash video encoding options. Also includes links to vendors.
