Other Player Alternatives - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 408

Figure 25-1 Flash movie player.

Your choice will revolve around what you know about your end users and what they
have installed on the target client systems.
Creating content for Flash-based players is straightforward. You can create content
manually using the Flash tools available from Macromedia, export from a variety of appli-
cations that support Flash, or download the Shockwave file specification and create the
files directly yourself with your own content-creation tools.
To encode Flash video, you will need a copy of the Sorenson Spark Pro codec. This is
available as a stand-alone tool or as part of the Sorenson Squeeze compression suite soft-
ware.

25.3 Forbidden Technologies

The Forbidden Technologies player is implemented as a Java applet, so it works in most sit-
uations. In the examples on the company web site, the controls are shown inset into the
video. Figure 25-2 shows an example of the player.
This compact player is very well suited to deployment in mobile applications.
This is an interesting video-compression system because the company decided to
implement a coding technique that is completely new and original. The video is coded
using edge and fill compression. What this means is that the codec seeks out the sharp
edges and codes them efficiently and then the areas inside them are coded as a fill. This
gives the video some intriguing characteristics. As the bit rate falls, the video quality does
degenerate but it doesn't exhibit the normal blocky appearance of a macroblock DCT-
coded video stream. Instead, it just looks more like an animated facsimile of the original.
This is generally kinder to the content. You can see the effect in the zoomed-in portion of
a video frame in Figure 25-3.

Linux Flash 7 player: http://macromedia.mplug.org/
Shockwave file format specification: http://www.openswf.org/
Sorenson Spark Pro Codec: http://www.sorenson.com/solutions/prod/mx_win.php