For the last couple of days I have been experimenting with video encoding again. Presently, the screencasters offer an H.264/MP3 AVI file for download. These files, so far, have been working out great for us. I hope they have for you too. Also, we rip that into an FLV file for those who wish to watch our tutorials on-line. For a lack of a better description, FLV has always been the retarded cousin of our AVI files. The quality is functional but know where near H.264.

Recently, Adobe had announced the new Flash Player with H.264 support (codenamed MovieStar). I was pretty excited when I read the news for the first time. However, it’s not going to be a cake walk for Richard and I. I’m fairly certain that we will have to change containers from AVI to MP4 to get our videos to play correctly with the Flash plug in.

So far I have been playing around with MP4Box. With it I can dump the audio and video track out of our AVI file and re-assemble it into an MP4 container. It literally takes about 10 seconds to convert the H.264 AVI to H.264 MP4. The problem though is that the audio and video get out of sync. Furthermore, I have not tailored the new MP4 file for a streaming download. I know how to hint the MP4 file but I do not know how to encode with a fast startup. Just when I get a handle on Mencoder, I am reminded that I don’t know jack about it. Perhaps FFMpeg has something in it’s toolbox that I could use.

So I am back to the basics again. I am trying to figure out if we can do away with Flash. What if we provided an embedded H.264 screencast that used the Quicktime plug in instead? (mplayer-plugin for the Linux folks) So far the Quicktime plug in woks great on Windows and Linux with a local file. Until I can figure out how to encode for streaming though, I’m dead in the water. For the next few days this is what I’ll be researching. I’ll be taking a break from screencasting while I do this. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted on our progress…if we make any. It’s a probability that I may come full circle right back to FLV’s.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.