lab.lukesturgeon.co.uk

I was surprised to recently find that many people are unaware of the fantastic Flash video bitrate calculator that was created by Robert Reinhardt and is hosted on the Adobe.com. I swear by this tool and now used it every single time I need to encode a video in the .flv format.

You pass in the aspect ration and width and height of you desired .flv along with a few other variables such as motion, codec and audio settings and the application calculate the optimum bitrate for your video. You can then use these values instead of the default settings in whichever program you use to encode your video. This gives you an .flv that is still high quality but can as much as halve the file size and CPU workload. I’ve created .flv files that are up to 5 seconds long and 300 x 250px is size that can be as low as 5K, that’s not a typo either, 5K!

Check out the Flash video bitrate calculator. I would have posted a screenshot of the app but my wordpress blog has other ideas. I’ve turned off my flash media uploader in wordpress after upgrading my Flash player to version 10.0.0 and now I can upload images again.