We are getting ready to welcome a new baby into our family, and so I've been preparing by (among other things) fixing up our family blog and adding some new features. The main thing I want to add is videos.
When that site was first launched it was static HTML and there were videos there. They were mostly 20 second shorts clips shot with my Canon s110 and documenting Stephen's first several months. These clips were progressive downloading Quicktime 5 clips.
Well, since then, I've moved all my sites over to Moveable Type and in the translation I never managed to get the videos back on our personal site. So, I'm trying to get back up-to-speed here, get those old clips back online and get ready with a new pipeline that will make it easy to post new clips.
To do so, I've been experimenting with using FLV files loaded dynamically into a SWF video player. I want some dynamically built as I plan to create a "videos" subblog under our family site.
So, my question is this: Do you prefer Quicktime over FLV files? If so, why? It seems like the FLV files don't compress as tight as QT does, but man they look great. Also, another consideration I like is that by going the FLV/SWF route, visitors to my site only have to download the small flash player versus the bulky Quicktime installer. Since this is a family site, a lot of the traffic there is from my parents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, etc. who may not have fast connections.
Comments? Thoughts?
1. | On October 17, 2004 4:29 AM, Jeff added:I would suggest if you have an audience of mostly Windows users.... absolutely use FLV's & maybe script an if else for Mac detection to throw Mac users a pop up with quicktime since they would have it. FLV's unfortunately tank on most g4's unless they are low framerate.
FLV is great in the fact it is so easy to put into existing flash files & script.
Quicktime is nice, but the installer is brutal for non computer types.
2. | On November 4, 2004 12:35 PM, brian added:I personally like FLV. I have Sorenson Squeeze 4, which is a great compression program. I get a much smaller file size and better quality than QT.
Still, WM9 will give me the best file size / quality, but I prefer FLV due to the small Flash 7 download size.
Here is a little video in FLV:
http://video.onsight-media.com/tangled_roots/Test_Video.htm
-brian
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