SWiSHvideo
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SWiSHvideo
Easily convert your video files so that they're
Web-friendly.
Requirements:
N/A
Rating:
 
Pros:
- Simple and clean interface
- Bitrate control makes it easy to ensure smooth playback
- Allows for output in Flash video (.flv) format
- A selection of control styles to choose from
Cons:
- No widescreen support
- Documentation is not very good
We would have given SWiSHvideo four stars if it
supported widescreen.
SWiSHvideo Web Site |
Introduction
If you look at any of the FrontPage forums or newsgroups,
you'll see plenty of people asking about how to put video on
their Web site. The advent of digital camcorders has made
moving video onto a computer a simple task. The movement
of video onto the Web is a natural progression, especially given
the high bandwidth available today at an affordable cost.
As fast as today's Internet connections are, video is still a
challenge. In order to provide viewers with a satisfying
video experience, you must balance a whole slew of variables
when the video file is created. SWiSHvideo from
SWiSHzone.com takes care of all of that for you and creates
bandwidth-friendly video in either Flash .SWF format or in Flash
video (.flv) format. Usage
The SWiSHvideo interface is as simple as they come. Do
convert a video, you just drag the video file and drop it onto
SWiSHvideo. We were a bit disappointed in the apparent
lack of MPEG-2 support. We attempted
to import an MPEG-2 file (the video format used for making DVDs)
and SWiSHvideo complained about it not being a supported file
format. We checked the documentation and it said that MPEG-2 is supported but that it "...depends on Windows Media Player
version and updates." We have the latest version of
Windows Media Player, all available updates, and an MPEG-2
decoder installed. Still, SWiSHvideo would not accept our files.
SWiSHvideo does not support widescreen video. If you've
got a 16:9 video that you want to convert, it will get squished
horizontally by SWiSHvideo. In order to convert widescreen
video (as we did for the examples in this review), you will need
to render that video is standard format with black bars.
That's a huge disappointed to us (we produce all of our video in
widescreen format) and we knocked off a star on our review for
this. SWiSHzone.com tells us that the next version of
SWiSHvideo will provide improved support for widescreen.
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