Question

I currently have an mp4 video embedded on my website, and I am using a flash video player called FlowPlayer to play the video. You can see the video here: http://www.verolinens.com.

The video file is about 14mb big, and I would like it to be even bigger to improve the video quality. However, I also need the playback to be smooth and without any breaks or pauses. Is there any way to make this possible? Can I have a high quality video that will play back seamlessly without any pauses?

Does it have anything to do with the flash player (flowplayer) that I am using? Is there a better alternative out there for this type of thing?

Any advice or direction on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Devin

Answer 1

When you’re streaming video, you have to make an assumption about your minimum connection speed. Not the speed someone has to their house, but the actual K/s they’re getting from the server streaming your video file.

Once you know that, you can approximately taylor the size of the video by specifying the max kbps when encoding it (or even just multiply minimum speed by length to get max size.)

Note there will be fluctuations on speed, and some servers are configured (if you’re streaming over http) to reduce the speed of a transfer over a certain size/length of time).

I don’t know flowplayer, so I can’t speak to it directly, but if you can control your buffer size, that’s a good way of getting the video to play well over longer periods of time. It’s a fine balance between buffer length and video length, but when I’ve written my own streaming players I’d compare the average download speed I’m getting to the length and bitrate of the file to make sure I had enough downloaded that I’d only be 90% throught the video when the entire file was locally cached.

Note, if you’re using a streaming media server, it will stream from the middle of files and the above is only relevant to when to start playing a file.