A higher quality youtube
My main purpose of posting this is to show a higher quality youtube. So here's how youtube works: you upload video, and behind the scenes they "encode" it to a special video format called "flv", and they purposely set the quality setting to like really low in order to save space and bandwidth for their servers.
That's all fine and dandy, but the side effect is that Adobe's reputation of "flash video" suffers -- people start thinking that the video quality of flash is just inherently low, which is wrong.
revver.com doesn't seem to have high quality flash video, but its still much better than youtube. And their integration all around is just better, notice if you are using internet explorer how you didn't have to "click" on the flash video (it's called "Active Content," or "How Microsoft screwed Adobe by giving in to the EOLAS law suite")... well anyway, this lack of a need to click on that horribly annoying transparent box is because they generate a script tag for you (as opposed to the old fashion object tag).
And my favorite feature, they actually use the "full screen" capability -- my God! it's about time people started using it, we threw it in since like 9r28 in around January. All you do in ActionScript is check the version, if its >= 9r28, modify the context menu to have the "Go Fullscreen" option by calling like stage.DisplayState = "fullscreen" or something. You also have to add an "allowFullscreen=true" to your object/script tag in HTML, but adding it in for an older version of flash player shouldn't hurt.
but yeah, good stuff revver.com, keep it up!
CORRECTION:
Youtube does go full screen... they threw it in in May i think. I was looking in the context menu for some reason, but there's this little button they added in the bottom right corner that i guess i never noticed.
I guess its a Youtube program management decision, but IMO it would be a good idea to throw that full screen option in the context menu... the flash player API lets you do that fairly easily.
Comments
I've had a lot of luck using Revver for my podcast. I didn't have to jump through any hoops to embed the videos on my website (I use Wordpress), and like you said, the quality is a lot better than YouTube. I still post the podcast on YouTube, but it's sort of like that line from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: YouTube for show, Revver for a pro.
Posted by: Butch Curry | June 28, 2007 9:34 AM
Something to keep in mind also is that YouTube can't can't control the quality of the source video files that users upload. Because of this, many videos are re-uploaded many times, which results in even worse quality.
If you compare uploads of good quality source videos, there isn't much difference:
http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/11/27/youtube-vs-google-video-vs-revver/
Also, YouTube does use the fullscreen feature of Flash player.
Posted by: Geoff | June 28, 2007 7:40 PM