Best program for converting videos to FLV
Posted on Dec 21, 2008 by
Paul White
Flash is by far the best format for streaming videos on your website.
Thanks to YouTube the FLV format has become almost in industry
standard. Now that you know you want your videos to be FLV, you have to pick a program
to do your encoding. I tried many, and recently I came across one
program that blew the rest away.
Sothink Flash Video Encoder is the
best FLV encoder I have ever used.
Other programs you can use to encode FLVs and how they compare
Adobe Video Encoder CS3
The program's interface is nice, but the FLV's it makes are huge and the quality is lacking. Also its rather slow doing the encoding. I am not sure why but CS3 seems to like consuming all your RAM until it crashes your system. Not sure if this is just a bug, but I have found this to be true on both my current and old workstation. The program also supports batch conversion, but since it never makes it through the first video, this is pretty worthless. Again maybe some people can get this to work, but it didn't work on my system. Also this program does not utilize multicore chips, as you will see one thread at !00% and the rest of your threads doing nothing.
Adobe Video Encoder CS4
Interface is similar to the CS3 version except its themed the in the vista black colors. Unlike the CS3 version this one actually works, and it also supports batch conversions. This program does not consume all your RAM. Seems to run pretty stable. Unfortunately it is just as slow as CS3. Only difference is when this one runs it uses all your cores. Except now you will see maybe 12% of all your threads being used instead of 100% of one thread. To me full utilization of Multicores means 100% of all threads. The quality of the FLV were the same as the CS3 version, bulky and poor.
Riva FLV Encoder
This program has similar features as the others, but some of the controls are a little advanced for new users. Even though it did generate a file with better compression than the Adobe products, it still couldn't compare to the Sothink product.
Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash
This is the best program for encoding your video to FLVs. The program can even output a SWF player to go along with your FLV. Simple easy to use navigation and controls. Simple Quality Settings based on Bandwidth and connections speeds. Video quality was high, and file size was small. Way smaller than what the CS3 and CS4 producsts gave me. Thumbnail export for your still frame included. They even have a free trial of it on their website. The only thing this product lacks is a batch conversion. Download it give it a try. If you like it you can buy a serial for only $45. Making this the cheapest solution.
Sothink also has a Server Sided API ( seperate product ) so you can upload your videos by a traditional submit form and let the server do the encoding for you, but I have not had a chance to give this a try. If you run
websites where your client is the only one uploading videos its better to have them do the encoding locally. If you have a site where the visitors are uploading videos you have to get a server sided solution. I am glad Sothink has moved into this arena, as its desperately needed within the developer community.
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