Making Flash Videos

[Mick Berg]

Hi.
This is my first visit to this forum. I want to make some Flash videos of my train sim game, Trainz, and post them on my web site. Can anyone tell me how to get the best quality and the smallest file size? I have read the two stickies, but I wonder if there are recommended settings for Flash.
Thanks,
Mick Berg.

[frapsforum.com]

With flash player 9+ you can actually play movies encoded with h.264, which gives pretty good size/quality. If you find a good spot with that codec then you should be good to go with stuff that can play in flash.

Also, this is a really good flash player to use on your site:

http://www.longtailvideo.com/

[Mick Berg]

Hi.
Yes, I'm using the Longtail player. I'm having a problem finding a free encoder that will convert Fraps AVI's to FLV (or h264 for that matter). There are a couple of payware encoders that work, AVSVideotoFlash ($59)and WINAVI ($29) but I was hoping for a freebie, as my website is purely a hobby.
The free Riva encoder fails with AVI's made by Fraps, but works OK with other AVI's. And at the moment I'm struggling with Staxrip, I find that it will never start the encoding process, and just prompts me to load another job. I wonder if it too doesn't like Fraps AVI's. (It's also a bear to work with before you have saved a suitable profile.) Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Mick Berg.

[frapsforum.com]

In staxrip, go to view>jobs and see if you can click the start button there once you have a job queued up. Also, if you're running vista you probably need to run staxrip with administrator permissions.

This is mainly to show how to crop but it shows what I do to get things encoded as well:

http://frapsforum.com/videos/staxrip-crop.mkv

[Mick Berg]

In staxrip, go to view>jobs and see if you can click the start button there once you have a job queued up. Also, if you're running vista you probably need to run staxrip with administrator permissions.

This is mainly to show how to crop but it shows what I do to get things encoded as well:

http://frapsforum.com/videos/staxrip-crop.mkv
I don't have Vista, just good ol' XP. I can't play your mkv video. What player do I need?
I'll spend some more time with Staxrip, until my head explodes.
Thanks,
Mick Berg.

[frapsforum.com]

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Plays pretty much any video or audio file, also handles DVD menu's and playback fine. Best part... it is free.

Side note is some all-in-one codec packs can mess with some encoding utilities, try to avoid having those installed if you can.

edit:

can read up more on mkv/mka stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska

[Mick Berg]

Thanks, I like VLC a lot. I noticed that it is capable of conversion as well, but I couldn't get it to convert to flv. Do you know if it's possible? Then I could junk all those other programs I've been amassing!
Thanks,
Mick Berg.

[frapsforum.com]

perhaps try virtualdub? I'm not sure why you're having a problem getting things to open fraps footage. The codec gets installed when you install fraps. Unless of course you're using a machine that doesn't have fraps on it :)

[Mick Berg]

perhaps try virtualdub? I'm not sure why you're having a problem getting things to open fraps footage. The codec gets installed when you install fraps. Unless of course you're using a machine that doesn't have fraps on it :)
Please have a look at my separate thread about free versus payware encoders. And maybe I should reinstall Fraps, I did some cleaning up and I guess I might have lost a file in the process.
Thanks,
Mick Berg.

[frapsforum.com]

try tossing any codec packs you have installed as well, those sometimes can hose things up more than they help. Even moreso when you're getting into video editing.

[Mick Berg]

I contacted DVDVideoSoft about the problem with converting Fraps AVI's to FLV, and the NEXT DAY they sent me a beta of a new version that converts properly. I'm very impressed with the way they dealt with my request, especially as it's a free program. I'll post a notice when the new version is released.
Mick Berg.

[frapsforum.com]

I just found a decent application called ASXGui, you can download it here:

Incredibly straightforward. Using the default profile gave me a very decent quality/sized conversion of a fraps file. I believe 264/mp4 is the default output, which you can stick into the flash player with no issues.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/asxgui/