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Advice for best FLV performance
I’m delivering 30sec-2min FLV clips within flash animations for a client. The clips are of talking actors: 15fps, 256kbps, On2 VP6, with alpha channel (they’re composited atop interactive backgrounds in Flash). They’re preloaded before the user sees them, and they play through NetStream objects. Neither I nor anyone else working on this project has seen any problems in performance, but the client keeps complaining that the video is jerky sometimes.
I’m fairly certain it’s just due to watching it on slower computers, but they’re adamant about fixing it. I’ve tried numerous things which have led to the current settings, the best so far. I’ve tried ditching the alpha channel and comping in the background in the video, but it didn’t help (it seemed worse to them. sigh…).
Does anybody have more ideas about how to make the FLVs perform better? I’d appreciate any ideas.
Thanks,
Mike
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20 Replies
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You’re probably right about the performance of the clients computer, you need to check how old it is.
If it’s newish, check they don’t have a gazillion applications running on it/limited RAM/or usual corporate firewall/anitvirus junk overloading it.
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Is it possible that the ‘jerkiness’ is due to the 15fps? Maybe try a 30fps version and see what they say.
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Actually, pretty well most of it looks like 24 (23.98) fps, there are some slo-mos, but they look like they are rather well interpolated or shot fast in the first place.
Nothing looks 15fps when played locally on my very ancient test Mac.
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Thanks for the feedback.
Whenever I ask for tech specs of their machines, I just end up with more demands. They’re of the belief that this should run on every computer ever made. I’m positive it’s due to a slow machine. I’m just looking for any possible way to make it play a little better.
I don’t think it’s the 15fps thing. I suspected that at first too, but the clients say the beginning parts of some videos appear jerky then are fine. Many videos they think work fine. It’s just the long ones that tend to have “jerky” part.
Daniel, I didn’t quite get the last post. What video were you referring to in terms of it looking 24fps?
Am I correct in thinking that going with h.264 wouldn’t improve performance (I’d have to comp in all the backgrounds)? I haven’t dealt with the format much in Flash, but from what I understand it’s more CPU intensive than VP6.
Thanks again for everybody’s help.
-Mike
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Sounds like a typical client to me!
I’m so sorry, I got this post mixed up with another post that’s having similar jerkiness problems with a flash video!
Anyway, one way to improve performance is to pre-comp everything. Compositing at the player end is too much of a CPU hog.
H.264 will be even harder for a low-end PC to play back
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No problem. I figured something got mixed up.
Sadly, I already tried pre-comping some videos and of course the client tested and complained that the pre-comped ones were still jerky and the un-comped ones looked fine (heavy sigh).
Any other thoughts on optimization? I know I’m running out of options…
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Any chance of seeing an example of one?
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I wish. It would make things much easier. Unfortunately, it’s totally covered by non-disclosure, so my putting piece of it online would result in a large amount of trouble.
The most detail on the videos I can give you is in terms of metadata, which I know is much less helpful than the genuine artifact. Also, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but the client generally experiences the most problems in the first 10 seconds of longer videos (over 1.5 min).
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Ok, fair enough.
Please then give a complete breakdown of your encoding settings:
Frame size
Keyframe rate
Audio data rate
EtcIf this problem happens in the first 10 seconds this can be the result of hiccups as the movie has finished progressively downloading. Ask them to visit a number of other sites and see what they experience. eg.hulu.com, youtube, vimeo etc
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Here’s the info. Thanks for helping with my rather ambiguous and hopeless quest.
Frame size: 776×504 (this varies somewhat. this size is for one of the more problematic videos)
Duration: 65s
Audio codec: MP3
Audio codec ID: 2
Audio datarate: 32kbps
Video codec: On2 VP6
Video codec ID: 4
Video datarate: 224kbps
Framerate: 15fps
Keframes: I had this set to auto when exporting from AE. It looks like AE made them every 2-4secAnd it has problems with or without alpha channel.
It should be completely done loading by the time the video plays. In all the tests I’ve done, the preloading has worked. I’m building a test now for the client to definitively make sure that it’s preloading for them.
Thanks again,
Mike
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