Not sure if this is an appropriate forum for this, but I have tried JW Player as well as other players, and all have similar issues... which leads me to believe it is not the players at fault. Since I hope to go back to JW Player if I can resolve the issues... I am posting here.
I am a web designer who knows a little (very little) about video. And most of what I know has nothing to do with video on the web, lol. But I have a client who has a website focused on videos, so I need to learn.
My client has a (mostly) professional recording studio filming and editing hidef TV quality episodes of a program. The studio uses final cut pro on a mac system to edit. I get these videos in mov format, roughly 6 gigs for a 28 minute clip. The video is 1920x1080 resolution, 44100 or 48000 AAC audio.
I use PC, and have Premiere Pro CS4 (just because it came with my CS4 bundle, a lucky coincidence). Through support from my RTMP server, I have settled on the following encoding options... FLV format, 640x360 resolution, CBR (512 kbps, 90% target), and leave the audio alone. This results in a 100-150 mb file.
I recenty started trying to encode multiple versions of the file, hoping it would resolve the issues... only changing the bitrate (128k, 256k, 512k, and 768k)... but it hasn't seemed to help.
Basically, I need HD quality video, which can be viewed fullscreen on most PCs with highspeed connection, that doesn't stutter, skip, or need to buffer for long periods. Right now I can't seem to do that. I have switched my RTMP server provider twice now, and tried every free (and a few paid) flash based player I can get my hands on. Nothing has made any difference; while on my personal machine with a relatively super fast connection I rarely have problems, my client is on medium quality DSL and constantly gets freezes, stutters, and long buffering times. I've tested the videos on my laptop in various wireless networks, and can very easily experience the same problems.
But with the same stuttering wireless connections, I (and my client) can browse other video providers (hulu, youtube, porn, etc.) and have smooth playing hi def video. So obviously it is possible at those connection speeds.
So do I need a new player? Have I just picked 3 bad RTMP server providers? Or is it, as I suspect, something to do with my encoding?
I am at my wit's end and looking for some help to get this fixed! I would appreciate any help anyone can provide!
Hi, Ken -
It does sound to me like your issues are stemming from the bitrate of your encodings. The FLV format doesn't compress high quality video very well, so it doesn't work well for high-def streams.
For higher definition video, I would suggest using h.264 compression (Adobe's extension for it is F4V). The compression rate is much higher than FLV, which decreases bandwidth requirements. However, the downside to this approach is that it requires more computing power to decode, so users with older computers or netbooks may experience some stuttering or lower framerates as their CPUs struggle to keep up.