Posted by cwdjrxyz on 06/03/07 04:07

On Jun 2, 4:40 pm, Phillip Mann <p...@bluegrassbanjo.org> wrote:
> How do I put a swf or avi picture on a page that opens FAST? I have a
> swf file embedded on a page but it takes FOREVER for the 110 meg file
> to open.


If you use the relatively new FLV/SWF method, you can open the video
at any time you wish. The flash consists of 2 files that are linked
internally and are created at the same time from a master video that
might be a high resolution mpg or some other high quality file. You
can create the flash at a bit rate suited for your application. In
this case, the . swf file contains only a flv player, controls, logos,
etc and thus is quite small and opens nearly at once. The flv(flash
video) that is created at the same time as a file linked to the swf is
the actual video. You have a swf file and the linked flv file on the
server in the same directory. You only have to call the swf as usual
on the web page. When someone views the page the small swf file that
contains the player comes up very soon, and the flv is automatically
being downloaded to the browser temporary cache. If you create
controls with play buttons to start, you can start the video nearly at
once. However if your download speed can not keep up with the bitrate
required for the video, the video will pause to allow buffering time
to download more video so playback can begin again. You can also
include a status bar in the swf player to see how the download is
going in relation to the playback. See http://www.cwdjr.net/flash/VTS_01_1_NEW.swf
for a short demo. This method is now being widely used by many large
sites such as MySpace, Google, YouTube, news sites etc.

I don't think you can stream anything of DVD quality, because this
requires a reliable download rate of over 10 Mbps for a typical
commerical movie quality DVD. Very few will have a broadband
connection fast enough to handle that, and even if you did network
congestion and server overload could greatly reduce the actual
download rate. . Thus, for any type of movie streaming, much
compression of the video is required if you want streaming to start in
a reasonable time and continue without stopping to buffer.

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