TheRealTimeWeb.com: Full Screen Flash Video

Full Screen Flash Video - ah yeah

Posted by Stefan Richter in Videos & Players | 20 Comments

Nothing groundbreaking here, just another little demo slash experiment. Someone recently asked about a full screen Flash Video piece and whether or not it can be done. Sure it can be done but there are problems one of which is: how big is full screen? 800 by 600 maybe? 1024 by 768?

Therefore it's tricky to know to what target size you should encode to. Maybe stick with 640 by 480 and scale up? I don't know the answer but what I can show you is what the result looks like when you encode a nice piece of source material to 640x480 and 800x600 respectively, then blow it up to fullscreen.

Note: resize your browser, then refresh the newly opened page - the player will not resize on the fly.

Sample 1: 640x480 target size
Sample 2: 800x600 target size

Both video data rates were 500kbps, audio 80kbps. The height differs a bit from 480 and 600 respectively as I chose to keep the aspect ratio. This was probably a mistake but shouldn't affect the outcome too much.

Make up your own mind about the results but feel free to share them via the comments link below.

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Posted on May 26, 2006 at 10:12 PM. 57452 views. 20 comments. Print

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#1 by Jensa on 5/26/06 - 9:16 PM

This is a site I've used a lot for screen resoltion stats lately: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/April/res.php.... Just for that one month, the stats are based on 174.336.715 Visitors so the numbers shold be pretty correct. They are based on the audience of many of the Internet.com sites.

J
#2 by Jeremy Fuksa on 5/26/06 - 10:50 PM

Can't say I saw too much of a difference in compression when blowing either one up to 1024x768 but the 640x480 one had much smoother motion when blown up.
#3 by Jay on 5/27/06 - 8:59 PM

Its intersting to see, is their any sites that can give same type of results on what ver of Flash

Java Stats
Sat Apr 1 00:01:01 2006 - Sun Apr 30 23:58:01 2006 30.0 Days

Java enabled: 164193404 (94%)
Java disabled: 1791223 (1%)
Java unknown: 8352088 (4%)
#4 by ryan on 6/7/06 - 3:12 PM

Thanks for the taste test Stephan.. Could you link me as to where to find the National Geographic .FLV .. I'm trying to do a proof of concept and am looking for some high quality video's in .flv format
Any other sites | stock .flv's ?

Thanks
R
#5 by stoem on 6/7/06 - 3:32 PM

you need to encode yourself but here:

http://www.sky.com/hd/ > explore > more to explore > HD clips
#6 by clnmuk on 6/7/06 - 4:09 PM

Great Demo / Experiment with surprisingly good results. Do you know if there are any good tutorials / resources that tell you how to achieve this result?

I have also seen similar effects that double the size of the video - does the video dimensional increase effect the amount of processor load on the computer?

Any help appreciated :)
#7 by stoem on 6/7/06 - 4:14 PM

well the tutorial goes like this: open Squeeze, compress file :-)

The videos here are encoded to a certain size but as you can see the player stretches it up to full screen. Yes, CPU usage probably goes up a bit the larger you display the vid.

HTH
#8 by Michael Harris on 6/14/06 - 6:41 AM

We are a fully online regionally accredited university, and every year we hold an online graduation. This year we used Maya and Swift 3D to create a larger-than-life virtual facility to hold the graduation in, and streamed it at 720 pixels wide. We got great results even with the stream for 36K users.

See the result at http://graduation.jonesinternational.edu/2006gradu...

Only the people speaking and the background are real, the rest was computer generated.

Michael Harris
Manager of Instructional Multimedia
Jones International University
#9 by stoem on 6/14/06 - 8:24 AM

hey Michael, this is really cool, nice job.
#10 by Adam on 10/3/06 - 9:57 PM

Does anyone know how to find the link's url on say youtube or metacafe for the full screen video?
#11 by clnmuk on 10/4/06 - 11:23 PM

Firefox has an addon that works really well
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
#12 by Lawrence on 7/11/07 - 9:05 PM

Wow! Thanks. I've seen this done before though.

To resize on the fly, use a listener on the stage.
#13 by lance on 8/15/07 - 7:04 PM

I am trying to make a 1024 x 576 flv using VP6 on squeeze to post as full screen. The trouble is that the VP6 codec stutters every 2" or so, On2 accept that this is a fault in the decoder and wont fix it as they on to new things.

Does anyone know of a clever fix or has experienced the problem?
#14 by r l on 8/16/07 - 5:15 PM

try converting video to mpeg2video and mp2 audio first, then run through vp6 encoder, problem is most likely with decoder rather than encoder.
#15 by Mark O on 8/18/07 - 12:47 AM

Nice Job - I have been testing and producing high quality at 720X480 and even up to 1024X752 screen size (at 2MB stream). Trick is to have Hi-Def source in AVI before encoding in flash. The option is there (under Advanced) to increase the screen size and stream rate. Great example at 1.5MB and 720X480 is http://www.flyhighanddream.com/mvid.html . If there is any encoding prior - pixel look (windows or QuickTime)will show. No getting around. Hope this helps!
#16 by Janko on 9/30/07 - 11:17 AM

Does anyone know how to do this? I cant find it anywhere!!!
#17 by Jaun on 10/3/07 - 6:05 PM

You want it to resize automatically?
click here
http://flashden.net?ref=luke
and search
Fullscreen Background Videos
#18 by YO on 1/21/08 - 7:51 PM

I'd say 640x480 size is easier to produce and less laggy for the audience.
#19 by Jason on 12/21/08 - 5:53 AM

if you take a look into things at thecounter.com you will find that they're far vrom correct when it comes to general consumers (internet.com is largely developers) For example, for the month of November 2008 (Fri Feb 1 00:01:02 2008 - Sun Nov 30 23:58:01 2008 304.0 Days) thecounter.com had 37,681,122 XP users, 2,335,899 Mac users, and only *5* Vista users.
#20 by Jeferson on 11/30/09 - 11:04 PM

very good