I have been using FLV (Flash video) to publish short video clips to my blog recently. It’s a really user friendly way for viewers to view short clips without having to download plug-ins, load helper applications, or download files and open them in various applications.
There is, however, a down side.
Flash 7 shipped with support for the Sorenson Spark compression codec, while the newer Flash 8 ships with support for Spark, and a newer, far more efficient codec, ON2 VP6. VP6 produces brilliant images in contrast to Spark, and at lower file size to quality ratios; however it’s not supported in older versions of Flash, which many users will still be using.
I’ve also been puzzled lately as a couple of people who I told to download Flash 8 were still unable to view the file (they could hear the audio but not see the video) even after they’d downloaded the new version of Flash player. I’m not entirely sure why this would be the case. Puzzling at this stage.
Above: Screenshot Flash 7 using Sorenson Spark codec
Above: Screenshot Flash 8 using newer ON2 VP6 codec