Whats the best Bit Rate for Flash movies?
 

I am upgrading my flash player and flash demo samples.
See one of the new ones below and tell me if it loads fast enough for you?
I used to use a pretty low bit rate but now I am making it higher and increasing the quality.
What do you think?

Silas's Videography Sample Video

Choppy playback (frequent stops for buffering) on my corporate LAN at work, OK at home. You are likely using a bitrate higher than 750Kbps... your warning to let it load comes in handy... At that bitrate you could make the window larger, or if you want to keep it so small, reduce teh bitrate.

When it does play, quality is very good.

I hope this helps,

Certainly looks good. Can you split the difference? Bring the quality down a tad to make it load just a little faster. The wait wasn't terrible, but I was conscious of it on a T1 connection.

Also, I would change the dimensions of the player so that the black bars on the sides of the video don't show.

made some adjustments...
 

Ok, try some of the other clips on here:
Everything should load good and you can see the player is larger
Silas's Videography | Video Demo Gallery


This one loads real good, see quality:
http://www.silasbarker.com/demo.html?deannabrian

Checked a few, they all load pretty fast. I think you jumped to the other extreme now, the size is a bit too large for the bitrate, so quality suffers a little.

In my own asessment, with today's technology, and in order to accomodate viewers with average (slower) internet connection, a 640x360 image size is the best, and a 500-700Kbps bitrate (depending on content) delivers good picture at that size. Again, this is my personal opinion, this is what works for me.

[Side note. It seems like my new Intel i7 64-bit computer running W7 Ultimate has an issue with Flash video, tends to have somewhat choppy playback if the video is an flv/f4v file, but plays smooth if it's h.264.mp4. Would you please tell me if your video is flash or h.264?]

Thanks,

Thanks for the input!
I think I got it now - I changed the size to what you suggested and it looks great!

Some of the files have a higher bit rates then others, but most of them are pretty streamable for DSL.

They are flash files.

great site Silas... can I ask what video flash player do you use ?

kind regards

Hey there,

I am actually not sure which player it is (someone else set up that part pf the site) but it is one of those free ones.

Glad you liked the site!

A right click on the player says "Jambocast". . .presume that is the player or is it a player/host site?

I've been encoding in both 640x360 and 960x540 with H.264 at 1.1Mbs with great results. I use SlideshowPro's hosting service which is really inexpensive and provides a one price 'all you can eat" deal. I shoot a lot of long form video as I cover our school's major events such as Grad ceremonies, basketball games, concerts, etc. At this rate, I get a ten to twelve minute video file that is less than 100 Mb which is the file size limit of the hosting service.

I post the 960x540 video in our community portals that are password protected. You can see the 640x360 video posted on the public side of our web site here:

Southridge School: Athletics » Photo and Video Gallery

You've got to be kidding!
 

That's 250-300Kbps tops video, with audio and all maybe 400Kbps total.

Or are you saying that you upload 1.1Mbps and then the provider re-encodes it to whatever they want?

Re: Whats the best Bit Rate for Flash movies?
 

If you clean up the video noise (I use the free Smart Smoother by Mike Crash in Sony Vegas, or some similar plugin), and edit properly, you can get clean HD (1280 x 720), 30 fps, at only 500 kbps or less (with the free Handbrake). Here's a sample:

Physics: The quantum explanation"

Re: Whats the best Bit Rate for Flash movies?
 

Here's Adobe's Bit rate Calculator:
Flash video (FLV) bitrate calculator | Adobe Developer Connection

Re: Whats the best Bit Rate for Flash movies?
 

I have a demo reel I'm trying to add to my site & it's an encoded flash file for 5 minutes at about 40MB. It plays very stuttered & I am on a good cable line. My thinking if it plays jerky here & takes a while to load (I have a new PC & fast cable connection) others are likely going to view it as worse speeds & it will become intolerable.

Do I need to compress it lower than 40MB?? Any suggestions as to how? I'm using FLV since I couldn't get H264 much less than 100. Also, my site is hosted thru GoDaddy, could it be a setting I have with them (need to pay $2.99/mo more;)