SWF Encoder - Notes

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Sswf is not yet fully optimised to handle the kind of movies LiVES produces. This means that it is not able to create more than small movies right now.

As a general guide, try to stick to 200 frames or less at 320x240 frame size. If you encode with audio, then you can only encode 100 or so frames.

This should be fixed in a future release of sswf to allow for any length of file. There are also some ways that sswf could be optimised to produce smaller files with better audio/video synch.

In my tests, I found it was not really sensible to use more than about 12 frames per second, as the players are not capable of keeping up higher frame rates anyway.

Notes on compiling/installing sswf:

The author of sswf reports that sswf can now be compiled with standard gnu tools. Follow the instructions on the sswf site to compile it.

Once you can type 'sswf' from the command line and have it execute, then you are ready to run the sswf_encoder. It is now included in the standard plugins, so in LiVES you can just go to Tools | Preferences | Encoding and switch to sswf_encoder.

It is best to test encoding with a small file. Debug mode will tell you if/when it runs out of memory.

SSWF support in LiVES

All versions of LiVES from 0.9.1-pre1 onwards fully support sswf encoding.

If there is enough demand, future enhancements could include:

- allow creation of non-looping movies
- allow lower quality encoding (smaller files)

Audio Restrictions

Swf can only handle audio rates of 5512, 11025, 22050 or 44100 Hz. If you have audio at a rate different to this, LiVES should resample it automatically before encoding.

Testing the swf file

Paste the html code below into a local html file. Change the "file:///usr/local/vid/test.swf" to point to your swf file. Then simply load the test.html file in a browser which supports playing Flash files. You can also use this code online. Just change the file to point to the URL of the .swf file, and upload everything.

It would be nice if people would mention that they used LiVES to create the .swf files :-)

-----------------Test html (thanks to Alexis Wilkes) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Test SWF movies</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="WHITE">

<H1>Test SWF movies</H1>

<OBJECT
CLASSID="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000"
CODEBASE="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=4,0,0,0"
WIDTH="240"
HEIGHT="180"
QUALITY="HIGH">

<PARAM NAME="movie" VALUE="test.swf">
<PARAM NAME="quality" VALUE="high">
<EMBED
        SRC="file:///usr/local/vid/test.swf"
        QUALITY="high"
        WIDTH="240"
        HEIGHT="192"
        NAME="Test"
        ALIGN="LEFT"
        TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash"
        PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>

</BODY>
</HTML>

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