Choppy video on pans

This is a problem with Flash. Simply said: panning motions are fairly processor intensive to decode. Flash is not particularly efficient at decoding panning shots when they are encoded in H.264. Because of this reason it is generally best to avoid panning shots as much as possible.

I have seen that performance is a bit better when the flv video format is used. To enable the flv format in your account you will need to do the following:

Go to the account tab. In this tab go to the "templates" section and create a new template. Select flv (H.263/mp3) as the video format, give it a name and press "create"

In the next screen select the width that you wish to use. The width of the template should at most be the width of your originals. or you will need to allow upscaling of the video. For transcoding select "apply this template to all new uploads" if you will need this for all your videos. (you will still have to apply this template manually to existing videos).

Now you will have to configure a player to use this template instead of the default bitrate switching mode.

Go to the players tab and edit a player by clicking on it. Go to the behavior section. For the adaptive streaming setting set it to use only use the Flash lite template.

In HTML5 mode (on iPhone and iPad) the player will still pick the mp4/h.264 conversion that fits the screen best, but in Flash mode the player will use the flash type conversion now.

I followed your instructions above, and tried both the recommended quality and lower quality versions. The results are actually somewhat worse than the H.264 version.

Any other thoughts? Should I try variable bitrate encoding on my end as I initially asked.

Thanks,
Bruce

Since all video gets processed again by our encoder, encoding on your end won't make any difference in that respect (unless the video quality of your uploaded files is abysmal).

What is the video key that you tried this for, so I can see if there is anything I can do to improve this?

Thanks for looking into this. The original encoding quality is very high.

I currently have this video as an FLV lower quality setting.
Here's the key:
Mediatype: video
Key: MBvYq58V

Your settings are correct.

While it isn't completely smooth, the video looks quite acceptable on my MacBook Air (which hasn't got a very powerful CPU); better than when the bitrate switching player is used in full screen mode. Lowering the video size would help too, when it comes to making video easier to decode by Flash.

At the end of the day this is a Flash limitation, so other than lowering the template size (and thus perceived quality), there is nothing that can really be done about this.

Thanks very much for checking this out, and getting back to me on a Sunday. I have a presentation tomorrow morning with the client, so this is very helpful.

I checked out another OVP service, and they have an option (via a line of code) to enable "video smoothing." This takes care of the problem of choppy video during camera moves (pans/tilts/zooms etc) when the video is played on Flash players.

Before I take this video over to another provider, I want to know if you have any plans for a similar implementation, and if so what the timeline is likely to be.

Thanks.

This is possible already. In the player details there is a "custom" tab where you can set custom vars.

If you set "smoothing" as key and "false" as a value, smoothing is disabled.

Do I understand correctly that video smoothing is already set to "true" by default?

Or, do I need to set "smoothing" as key and "true" as value to enable smoothing?

Thanks.

smoothing is currently the default, but disabling it might paradoxically improve this because with smoothing enabled Flash will require more CPU to post-process the video.