March 5, 2006...12:25 am

Flash videos

If you haven’t yet noticed, Flash video (FLV) is the next big thing in video. It’s the format used by Google Video, YouTube, and Blastyx. Forget about Real, Windows Media, and QuickTime; content providers should now be publishing in FLV format. Flash 6, which is required to play Flash videos, is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux and now has over 97% market penetration in North America and Europe — better than any of the “Big Three”.

I get frustrated by sites like NBC.com or ebusiness.byu.edu that publish their videos exclusively in Windows Media format, which often don’t work on my Mac. (And NBC purports to be partnering with Apple on the show The Office but Mac users can’t watch their videos!) There’s no excuse for excluding an entire platform when Flash video now makes it so easy to reach everyone.

I have published movies in FLV and found it very easy. I edited the movies in iMovie, exported them as DV, converted them to FLV with Squeeze, then published them with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver wraps your FLV files in a SWF player. Google Video and YouTube appear to have written their own custom SWF players, but Dreamweaver comes with a few to choose from.

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4 Comments

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4 Comments

  • Blake
    March 5, 2006 at 3:25 am
    Yeah, though I’ve never been a big fan of flash, they do nail video. ActionScript is a mess and Ajax is a much more scalable solution for animatric programming.
  • jordy
    March 6, 2006 at 12:14 pm
    “There’s no excuse for excluding an entire platform when Flash video now makes it so easy to reach everyone.”

    Don’t forget all of the other varieties of Unix, Linux, and BSD. They are actually excluding lots of platforms.

  • Luke
    July 26, 2006 at 1:05 am
    Could you please tell me how you have gotten your video to work on Google Video and YouTube? I like you am using iMovie. However, I am having major problems with compression, quality etc. The more detail the better.

    Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

    I don’t have Dreamweaver, though.

  • Richard K. Miller
    July 27, 2006 at 8:50 am
    Luke: Google Video and YouTube accept many formats, though they may downscale the quality to their own liking. The formats MPEG-4 and H264 (both available in iMovie) will work for Google Video and YouTube.

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