Buying a compression software

[Daniel Low]

It’s odd that you are going with WMV over H.264 (in Flash or indeed Silverlight) which is the way everybody seems to be going these days…..but…..

I go with Flip4mac, if you can go the extra bit for the Studio Pro HD version you get two pass encoding which will help the quality somewhat.

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Two years from now, spam will be solved. – Bill Gates, World Economic Forum 2004

[Sarah Levitt]

Well, I am going with the .wmv because of what I’ve throughout the forums on Creative which say that for H.264 you need a quicktime player.
Of course our users could download it for free, but we are dealing mostly with car mechanics and window film installers, I don’t think they will bother to download the player (we will put a link to quicktime download until we convert all the videos) and we want these videos to be viewed. Or am I wrong about the H.264 and quicktime?

Sarah A. Levitt

[Daniel Low]

[Sarah Levitt] “Well, I am going with the .wmv because of what I’ve throughout the forums on Creative which say that for H.264 you need a quicktime player.”

Whoever told you that was wrong (or right at the time if it was from a long time ago but things have changed).

H.264 can be played in a Flash Player, a Sliverlight player, VLC, Quicktime and a whole host of other players.

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Two years from now, spam will be solved. – Bill Gates, World Economic Forum 2004

[Sarah Levitt]

And on windows media player?

Sarah A. Levitt

[Daniel Low]

Not without installing extra software.
Pretty well everybody has Flash installed, that’s why it’s the best choice for the biggest reach.

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Two years from now, spam will be solved. – Bill Gates, World Economic Forum 2004

[Sarah Levitt]

OK, because the majority of the videos are in H.264 already (some are in .mp4 – big mess), but when I have my colleagues to play the video on their PCs (they don’t have a Flash player) it doesn’t play at all, that’s why I thought I should have them compressed as .wmv

If I do decide to go the .wmv way, I will probably do it through flip4mac then.

Anyway, I’ll give it some more thought. Maybe call some installers and see if they can see our videos. Thanks for all your input!
Have a great weekend,
Sarah

Sarah A. Levitt

[Daniel Low]

If you are delivering over the web then the browser will look after the flash player, once your webpage has been authored as such of course.

Read up a bit on Flash – your H.264 files should be fine as they are..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video

https://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/video_guide.html

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Two years from now, spam will be solved. – Bill Gates, World Economic Forum 2004

[Craig Seeman]

As Daniel has been describing
H.264 will play in Flash like any other flash video. All Flash video must be wrapped in a Flash player.
As of next Microsoft Silverlight update H.264 will play wrapped in Silverlight player as well.

Flash had 98% market penetration which is MORE than Windows Media Player or Quicktime.

Flash Player 9 Update 3, which is compatible with H.264, was released in December 2007, closing in on a year and a half ago.

There’s only a shrinking number of corporate IT people who still limit their computers to Windows Media Player. The value of that target market is shrinking since any business with such a limit generally isn’t on the forefront of making media based decisions as they’ve seriously cut themselves off from such resources. Some distribution points are tied to Windows Media Servers and they may prefer WMV as well but I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually move to Silverlight (which can handle H.264).