There are many video formats in computer world. Say MPG, WMV, AVI, MP4, The FLV is a video format played by flash player, which is installed almost 99% of computers all over the world.
Video quality of the different formats widely vary. MPG compression is quite bad, a thing from the past. Regular FLV, WMV and MP4 have a similar, decent quality/ filesize performance. Quicktime 7 introduced a superior new codec (H.264) in 2004, which is used in MP4 and MOV files. Flash Player 8 introduced a similar impressive new codec, the ON2 VP6. And the latest Windows Media (version 10) has the excellent VC-1 codec. What does this mean? If you use one of these newer codecs you get great video quality at small filesizes, but since the software is less widely adopted, it’s possible that your visitors first need to upgrade their plugin.
The only weak point of the flash player is that it solely supports its native FLV format, so you’ll have to convert your existing videos to the FLV format. MP4 support is on it’s way as well, but the required plugin version hasn’t spread yet.
To make a better quality of FLV video. The following instruction are suggested.
1) Rescale the source (720×540) to (480X360) or 320×240 to an uncompressed intermediate file.
2) Use the 2-pass VBR converter, use a keyframe for every 2 seconds (50 frames) for video with little motion up to a keyframe every half second (10 frames) for video with a lot of motion.
3) Bitrate for the video: 200 – 1000 kbps. Audio is set to 32, 64 or 96 kbps mp3. 32 for just speech, 96 for cool music.
Although there is weak point for .flv, there are many converters available to convert from any format to .flv.