Tech Notes
I got tired of struggling to get good video quality out of the Sorenson Spark codecs included with Macromedia Flash MX 2004, and downloaded the trial version of Sorenson Squeeze. This will do a direct conversion from WMV to Flash's native FLV format, or directly to a Shockwave Flash SWF file. See the Turtles page for an example of a Sorenson-created SWF file.
The quality is definitely way better for the same or less file size. One nice feature of Squeeze is that it includes the step for compressing the audio track separately (at whatever rate you please), so you can skip that whole step. In fact, you don't have to even have Flash at all - Squeeze will compress and safe directly as a SWF file, which you can drop right into your webpage.
To get rid of that pesky watermark, I'll have to buy Sorenson Squeeze; fortunately, there's a Flash-only version for only $99.
I moved the Stop and Play buttons out of the SWF files, instead using some simple JavaScript on the webpage itself (no, I don't know anything about JavaScript - I'm just blindly using DreamWeaver's built-in capabilities). This seems to resolve an earlier problem - that you needed to wait for the whole file to load before it would start playing. However, my buttons don't work in all browsers; I'm using Firefox for most of my browsing these days, but I have to use Internet Explorer to test these new pages, and some viewers have reported trouble with other browsers as well. Drat. |
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