a blog by Peter Leonard
Just got back from the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Vegas, in time to catch up on a little broadcasting of my own. Hard to believe it's already 5th week of the quarter -- the clips I'm encoding for this week come from Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity.
I had a nice chat with some Adobe/Macromedia folks at the Adobe booth at NAB, which among other things helped clarify exactly what versions of Flash suport video. The short answer is that 6+ does, but 6 only works with the video baked-into the SWF. This is a bad idea from a variety of perspectives, but most crucially because audio and video sync are almost guarenteed to be off. External *.flv video support only came with version 7 of the Flash plugin, so that's why my clips weren't working on some version 6-equipped kiosks in the library.
Thus, I'll keep encoding for the 7-level plugin -- even though the Sorenson Sparc codec has been obsoleted by the On2 support in Flash 8. There are more than enough machines on campus with only version 7 -- maybe next year version 8 will be widespread enough.