Jimco Software Reviews - Macromedia Flash MX Professional and Macromedia Video Kit(continued)
Macromedia Video Kit
If you're a Dreamweaver user, you'll be interested to know that Macromedia has a product specifically designed to make it easy for you to use Flash video in your Web site. The Macromedia Video Kit includes an extension for Dreamweaver that makes it simple to insert Flash video into your Web site without using Flash at all. (The Macromedia Video Kit is not included with Flash. It is sold separately or as part of Studio MX 2004.) Before we go into any more detail on that, let's have a look at another component that comes with the Macromedia Video Kit; the Sorenson Squeeze video encoder.
As we've already mentioned, there are quite a few options for encoding Flash video from your existing video files. We've tested many of them and have had satisfactory results with many, but we were blown away by the capabilities of the Sorenson Squeeze 4.0 (figure 10) encoder that comes with the Macromedia Video Kit.
Figure 10 - The Sorenson Squeeze Encoder
Flash itself uses the Sorenson encoder to encode video and Flash will also allow you to export video in the FLV format. However, you don't have same level of control that you do from Sorenson Squeeze. The Macromedia Video Kit is aimed squarely at Dreamweaver users (it is not part of Flash), but we felt that Sorenson Squeeze itself was well worth the $99 that Macromedia charges for the Video Kit.
Note: After you install Sorenson Squeeze, click the Check for Product Updates item on the Help menu to upgrade it to version 4.1. The update is free.
Now let's have a look at the Video Kit extension for Dreamweaver (figure 11) so that you can easily insert Flash video into your Web site. The extension is the primary component of the Macromedia Video Kit, and it makes inserting and configuring Flash video from Dreamweaver a breeze. In fact, if you're serious about using Flash video, the Video Kit's Dreamweaver extension is the best way to open up all of the options available to you quickly and easily.
Figure 11 - Dreamweaver Flash Video Extension (This screen shot taken from Dreamweaver MX.)
Using the Dreamweaver extension, you can choose from a selection of controller skins and how you want to video to play back. Video can be played back using the following methods:
Progressive Download Video
Using this method, the video is downloaded to the viewer's hard drive and played directly from there. Video will start to play once a certain percentage of the video has downloaded. This is the method that we used in this review and you can see that it works well. This method requires the Flash Player version 7 on the viewer's machine.
Streaming Video
The video is streamed to the viewer's computer. The video will begin playing instantly, but this option requires access to a Macromedia Flash Communication Server. This method requires the Flash Player version 6.0 or later.
Flash Video Streaming Service Lite
This method is similar to the Streaming Video method. The difference is that this method uses an external service that streams your video over a load-balanced system. That means that you get reliably delivered bandwidth on every viewing of your video. It requires Flash Player version 6.0 or later.
The Macromedia Flash Video Kit includes a 15-day trial account for this service. If you'd like to purchase the service, the cost is a beefy $99 per month, so unless you have a real business-need for this service, it will likely not be cost-effective for you. However, if you need high bandwidth service reliably without any hiccups, this is a great service.