Are flv clips required for affiliates anymore?
 

I'm working on a bunch of new promo tools for affiliates and am wondering if I should even worry about FLV clips anymore? Aren't h.264 mp4's the new standard?

We do H264

i need flv's

Aren't most scripts able to import mp4 or flv for streaming?

As long as they'll play in the standard Flash players, H264 is fine... Just don't go crazy and make them huge... Too many ppl make them bigger than they would an FLV.. H264 is higher quality so in fact they could be smaller or at least the same damn size.

What all do ya do for Affiliate programs?
I may be looking for a new aff manager so i can focus on shooting more. :)

h.264 is not a standard, it just makes a lot of sense.

The surfer can skip ahead in an h.264 video without the portion skipping to
being downloaded already.

Flv can only skip foward to what has already been downloaded.

Hypothetical Case : You want to give affiliates 10 minutes videos.
Then better to make them h.264 to save bandwidth by people forwarding
to the cumshot instead of waiting for the entire video to load.

Very good info here!

HUH???

You can do pseudostreaming with FLV. I use Lighttpd running side by side with Apache.

http://flowplayer.org/plugins/stream...streaming.html

Some people have custom flash players that will not attempt this type of
seek function if it detects a flv, because previously this did not work like they wanted.

So you can pseudo stream a flv but that
doesn't mean all your affilates will have players that allow the seek on a flv.

It's easy to change that inside the flash player, but being easy doesn't mean it will
get done.

Yeah, thats what I thought. I've seen a few webmasters request only FLVs, but it seems to me that they should be able to use the h.264 as well.

We are currently re-encoding all of our videos, and I'm considering only h.264.

I'm not for hire anymore, but can point you to a few people who are... hit me up at sharky /at/ radicalcash.com

Really??? Really??? You sure about that without having a streaming server?

If any flash player simply takes the URL of the video and issues the play
command then h.264 will play on all players.

It is only a issue that some players will handle flv and h.264 differently.

The player will play both videos, but some webmasters will have a player that
will not seek forward on the h.264 because of the action script commands they
use. Of course that same player does not do it for flv either.
So no loss to use h.264 it seems.

With most people using the JW player or similar, it would seem to be a very small
number of sites that cannot jump foward on a h.264.
But even if a player cannot jump forward, the video will still play.

Of course the server is going to stream it, nobody
sets that up without streaming.

h.264 will have to download the whole video before it plays if the server
does not stream.

So who would do that, besides you? :1orglaugh

Sites would use Flash Media Server with h.264 and that was the most common
way to use it. And that's where the "h.264 can stream and jump but flv cannot"
came from since people used flvs without Flash Media Server.

So seeing a .flv pretty much meant it didn't seek pass the downloaded portion
and seeing an h.264 pretty much meant that FMS was streaming it.

That is changing with other media servers being available now.

In other words... There's no difference between offering FLV or H264 in terms of the whole "seeking" thing you've been talking about since you need a streamng server to do the seeking beyond what's been downloaded. In which case, FLV or H264 doesn't matter since they can both seek to any point regardless of how much has been downloaded.

Anyhow, I'm moving own.

Everybody can do what they want to do with anything they want to use.

No. I already stated that the issue is with custom players that treat the files
differently.

Why don't you try fucking reading.

If you don't write action script and build FLV players then you would not know this.

Fuck off dumbshit.

I did read moron...

Which was total bullshit. Then you backtracked and started making it all contigent on other things.

Bottom line.. They're basically the same damn thing.. If the guy doesn't have a streaming server, neither will be seekable beyond what's been downloaded and if they have some custom player, well they'll more than likely be fucked either way if it can't handle things properly.

Yes.......

Excellent thread!!

Last I heard mozilla browsers were avoiding official h.264 support. Also google is speaking of officially pulling h.264 support in Chrome: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/htm...in-chrome.html

As an affiliate I can't tell you how many sites I have been unable to promote fully because the promo material offered was in a format which I was unable (or unwilling) to use for one reason or another. Why not offer everything reasonable? After all you convert it once and thousands of affiliates have it. The effort should pay for itself, no?

Too late to edit but I thought I'd quote what's happening in Chrome in regards to built in h.264 support:

http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/htm...in-chrome.html

It's probably not a wise move to rely solely on it. It's a good technology but due to it not being fully open there are many who do not support it.

i dont need flv content, i just need hosted flv so my script can import them.

That is all about HTML5 and nothing to do with Flash.

Flash will play the h.264 video, not chrome/firefox/ie/opera/safari/etc....

The reason we are using Flash players is because it works in all those browsers
because those browsers turn the work over to the Flash engine.

HTML5 is a useful tool, however, I still consider that it fails in too many areas when
compared with Flash.

Chrome's move to take out h.264 is just more fail for HTML5, because Flash
will continue to play h.264 in the Chrome browser anyway.



The problem with HTML5 is that it does not provide the kind of awesome tools
for the programmer that is in Flash. So html5 looks cool to a webmaster putting
up a video but looks like a black hole to a programmer trying to draw and create
animation.

I can't even begin to list the failures of HTML5 if Flash games are considered.

So I don't see programmers and animators giving up Flash any time soon and thus
relying on HTML5.

If someone hires me to make them a video player then I sure as hell ain't going to
make it HTML5. I wanna get paid when the shit is done. :1orglaugh

I've been encoding my own videos for years. Why are other affiliates lazy?

Same here....

I encode my own videos because 99% of programs don't encode properly. The FLV file needs to have meta data injected so it can stream properly.

Clarification/correction to some of the posts here:

1. Flash Player 9 update 3 (v9r115) and above will play H.264s or FLVs equally. Anything earlier than that will NOT play H.264s. You should have a fallback script, like YouTube does.

2. The inability to seek on an H.264 has to do with the placement of the moov atom. QuickTime and a few other encoders places it at the end, but Flash needs it at the beginning, or else the entire file must be downloaded first. A utility like MP4Box will move the moov atom.

3. Any modern streaming server or pseudo-streaming script will allow Flash player (as long as its v9r115 or above) to seek to any valid timepoint, but this requires keyframe metadata in the file. Many encoders do not add keyframe metadata by default, for either FLV or H.264. It must be added by a metadata utility.

4. HTML5 doesn't offer the extras people have come to expect in Flash video players. JavaScript needs to be written and tested for cross-browser compatibility for things like endroll ads. These are the reasons HTML5 will not in the near term replace Flash player. People like Flash because of its consistency for anything beyond simply playing a video.

5. The note about not overdoing H.264 bitrate and size is a good one. Many people try to encode at HD resolutions using the standard H.264 profile. You need the encoding profile designed for HD, otherwise the user's playback experience will likely be compromised, even on a dual-core machine.

6. And yes, you need a player that knows how to stream, versus one that's written just for progressive download (where you can't seek to an arbitrary time that has not yet been downloaded). All of the popular players (JW Player, Flowplayer, etc.) have this feature built-in, but for many you need to tell it the protocol you're using. Otherwise it may assume progressive download and not allow seeks beyond the portion already downloaded.

I think HTML5 is the future though so it makes some sense to start moving towards it. It's just too bad that it's in a state of disarray at the moment without solid built-in support across all the majors browsers for any one particular codec. I'm sure that will change in time and HTML5 will become the accepted standard.

How many videos do you add per week and from how many different sources and formats? If it's a few dozen, fine. But if one is adding hundreds or thousands then that isn't very realistic.

It's more logical for the sponsor to code it in different common formats because they only need to do it once as opposed to forcing hundreds of affiliates to reinvent the wheel and waste hours of their time and resources. The argument that the affiliate is lazy could easily be turned around on the sponsor in question.

There's also been some serious resource utilization issues on certain platforms (Apple) up until the most recent versions when it comes to playing h.264 videos wrapped in flash. Not to mention some devices choosing not to support flash at all (looking at Apple again).

Yeah, Google is pushing hard to have everyone support WebM as THE format of the future and to be the "standard" for HTML5. H264 has the licensing issue which could fuck over everyone in the next couple years... Google doesn't think there's any issues with WebM but that's still to be seen.. There are those that have had a deep look at it and there's a lot of similularities to H264 which could raise all sorts of patent issues just like it did for H264.

I don't really like WebM as it's actually not quite as good as H264. However, I believe that it will be the new standard going foward... ffmpeg is already working on integrating it all in.. YouTube is already using it on it's HTM5 beta site. And of course Google "claims" it's patent and licensing free... So everyone should start preparing for it.

Not to throw a spanner in the works but H.264 can also go in an FLV container so these things are not mutually exclusive.

The consideration here is that pseudostreaming for MP4 isn't near as good as for FLV. For short previews this isn't as much of an issue but if you look at a lot of large tubes they are using FLV container for streaming H.264 to Flash players, rather than MP4.

The disinformation in this thread is enlightening. <facepalm>