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Jimco Software Reviews - SWiSHvideo (continued)
Settings
The settings in SWiSHvideo are divided into
three sections; output, video, and audio. Let's have a
look at the options available for each type of setting.
Output Settings
The output settings allow you to control how your video file
is written when it's converted. The different settings
that are available are shown in figure 1.
Figure 1 - Output Options
The file name displayed here is an SWF file
(Flash format), but you can also render files in Flash video
format (FLV format) that can be used in Macromedia Flash.
(We will be reviewing Flash and its video capabilities in an
upcoming review.)
The Variables button allows you to specify
variables that can be used in external programs such as
SWiSHmax. (The documentation contains information on how
to use SWiSHvideo and SWiSHmax together.) The controls
that are included with SWiSHvideo contain some pre-defined
variables that you can use as well. More information is
available in the documentation.
Video Settings
The Video tab, shown in figure 2, allows you
to configure how the video is converted. From here, you
can control the bitrate settings which allows you to guarantee
smooth playback at a specific bandwidth. The bitrate
settings range from 50kbps (about 56k modem speed) to 900kbps
(average DSL bandwidth), but you can choose an unlimited bitrate
as well which allows you to explicitly specify quality settings.
One thing to keep in mind is that the final bitrate will be a
combination of the video bitrate plus the audio bitrate.
Figure 2 - Video Options
In our experience, suitable results were obtained using the
hard-coded bitrates. You can view some samples below.
Incidentally, you can see the slightly jerky results that we get
when using SWF video format in these videos. That, we
believe, is a result of the Flash player and how it deals with
video displayed in this way. You will get much better
results using Flash video (*.flv) format. Future reviews
on Macromedia's technology will go into more detail on this.
| Bitrate set to 900kps (highest
hard-coded setting) |
View Sample |
| Bitrate set to 200kps (mid-range
hard-coded setting) |
View Sample |
| Bitrate set to 50kps (lowest hard-coded
setting) |
View Sample |
| Bitrate set to unlimited (Quality set as
shown in figure 2) |
View Sample |
The Deblocking and the Smooting options do
affect the output, but we were not able to clearly figure out
what they do exactly. The documentation simply says "Deblocking
and Smoothing are indications used at playback runtime. When
set, the playback is of a better quality but may require a good
CPU." We will leave it up to you, but we didn't find that
particularly helpful.
Audio Settings
The Audio tab (shown in figure 3) provides all of the
settings you need to configure the audio conversion.
SWiSHzone.com has provided you with a fair amount of control
over how the audio is converted.
Figure 3 - Audio Settings
If you click the Config button, you have access to advanced
options for the codec you're using as shown in figure 4.
Notice that the dialog tells you to familiarize yourself with
the meaning of these options before changing them.
Unfortunately, there is no documentation on any of these
settings, so we were not exactly sure how to go about
familiarizing ourselves with their meaning.
We contacted SWiSHzone.com about this and they told us that
these settings are provided by the manufacturer of the codec and
that's why they don't provide documentation. That's
understandable, but we must mention that Sony's
Vegas software ships with the
MainConcept MPEG-2 encoder and uses the MainConcept dialogs, and
yet they still offer comprehensive documentation on those
settings. We feel that SWiSHvideo should provide at least
some documentation on the codecs that ship with the product, but
the lack of it is certainly not a deal-breaker.
Figure 4 - Advanced Audio
Configuration
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