Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff2003: video in flash mx (part 1)

Current session: “Video in Flash MX: Creating, Developing and Deploying,” presented by Mike Davidson and Danny Mavriotis of ESPN.com.

With the Flash 6 player starting to reach the high penetration rates of previous versions, deploying video in Flash MX is starting to become a viable option for publishers big and small. In this three-hour workshop, attendees will learn the pros and cons of using Flash as a video delivery vehicle, learn proper encoding practices, see comparisons of video quality among all major formats, and learn how to create a data-driven video application and deploy it on the Web. This workshop is recommended for intermediate to advanced designers, developers, and producers.

The dynamic duo started out by demonstrating a Flash-based video player that featured video clips from The Daily Show. The clip of choice involved a “civil rights” campaign for smokers. The crowd cheered.

They followed up with a brief look at how video has historically been used with Flash. To sum it up — basically a lot of “faking it” via image sequencing, framesets, pop-ups, DHTML, etc. They promoed an example of the latter — Windows Media Player video layered over Flash — targeted at Comcast broadband users. They mentioned that the site’s use of WMP has more to do with business deals than necessarily the quality of hte application.

They’re using a similar tactic (video layered on top of a Flash interface) with the site’s new “ESPN in Motion” feature. They conceded that the application would be more cross-platform if they deployed it in Flash instead — and the quality would be just as good (of not better) as what WMP offers.

One of their difficulties in launching “ESPN in Motion” was that, initially, they encoded all their video in WMP 9, not realizing at the time that many of their users used WMP 6 or 7 and thus couldn’t view the video. They’ve since started saving video in the older format, and expressed some frustration at not being able to do a “version detect” for WMP, like you can with Flash.

They jokingly added:

“Our philosophy is launch first, fix later … At the end of the day, it’s just sports.”

Slide bullet points and related comments:

Importance of Flash MX Video

- Reduces incompatibilities between systems

- Reduces complexity of machine interaction (Flash isn’t as processor-intensive as media players.)

- Easier to set up the client

- More self-contained

- Not easily saveable on client machines

- More consistent playback across platforms

- No missing codec issues (there is no codec)

- Fully transparent display mechanism (no branded console or “message center”; wholly developer-driven)

- Temporal compression (only save the data that changes from frame to frame)

- Easily importable and reusable across Flash applications

- Fully maskable and scriptable

- Potential for playback on compact devices (not used much, but the potential is there)

- Very predictable penetration rate

Limitations of Flash MX Video

- Currently not batch encodable in many programs (i.e. Cleaner, Anystream, etc. This feature is offered in Sorenson Squeeze and similar Flash-oriented programs, just not as powerful as the other video output programs.)

- No built-in buffering mechanism (However, Wildform Flix Pro offers an option for this feature when you export video out of that program.)

- No built-in connection speed detection mechanism (No media players can do this. They cheat by looking at your video preferences, not your actual connection speed.)

- No SureStream type capabilities

- Maximum length of 16,000 frames for every SWF file (Sorenson Squeeze has a workaround called “stitching.”)

- Audio sync issue (One of their biggest hang-ups up to this point on Flash video. The latest version of Sorenson Squeeze has a fix for this problem. They suspect that the way Sorenson does this is to drop video frames when the video is played on slower processors.)

- Video does not automatically stop on the last frame.

- Upscaling video size is slightly inferior to other video formats. (WMP, in full-screen mode, has slightly better quality than a similar Flash-based video file expanded to full screen.)

- No native full screen mode.

- Not a reference format. (You shouldn’t save video solely to Flash format. You’ll want to save an archive version in Quicktime, too.)

- No real rights management capabilities. (The other media players don’t really have it, either.)

In a brief Q&A session, they also discussed why they’re not using Flash Communication Server. They said that their big issue with FCS is scalability, which makes it impractical for a high-traffic site like ESPN.com. Their thinking is that FCS is better suited for use for projects involving more limited audiences, such as videoconferencing.

They also briefly mentioned the recent ESPN.com redesign, in which the site was recoded to be standards-compliant, relying on CSS rather than table code and font tagging. The move effectively blocks out IE4 and NS4 users, who are sent to a special page explaining why their browsers suck and why they should upgrade.