Controlling Buffering in .flvs
 

I encoded dozens of hours worth of .flv files for my company's pay-per-view website (Art Instruction Videos Online at ArtWorkshops.TV - Home) using On2 Flix Pro. We have a customer complaining that after our Flash player is done buffering, it sometimes plays back continuous audio but cuts in and out on the video track. He prefers the buffering behavior on one of our competitor's sites (ArtistsNetwork.tv - Home), where he says the Flash videos buffer for longer but always play back video and audio simultaneously when they're finished buffering. Our site seems to play back audio quicker but waits for the video to catch up. Our customer acknowledges that he has a slow connection, but he doesn't mind waiting for buffering - he just wants the video and audio to play back simultaneously after the buffer fills. That makes sense for our customers because our site is entirely instructional material for visual artists - pauses are better than sync problems or audio playing back with no video. Our site was built by a contractor, and we have spotty communication with him right now. Does anyone know whether I can control this buffering behavior on the encoding end or whether it's possible to control it at the server or in the embedded Flash player? I have very little knowledge of Flash outside of encoding .flv and H.264 files for Flash playback, but my reading on the Adobe site indicated that most buffering behavior is controlled by the server or player. I couldn't find anything about the behavior our customer describes, and I don't know the name for it. I would happily change my settings in Flix Pro if there's something I can do on the encoder end to affect this buffering behavior. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

The only way you can control the buffering behavior on the encoding end would be to create smaller FLV files, which unfortunately be lower quality.

Your site has a very old version of JW Player. You could probably fix this problem simply by downloading and replacing it with the latest version.

Thanks Chris. I'll pass on the info about the outdated JW Player to our webmaster. We are actually considering encoding a lower quality version of every file and directing users with slow connections to those files. Our webmaster says he can make a multiple bit-rate solution like that work for our site without too much trouble.