November 21, 2007

FLV metadata & Adobe Encore

Some applications like Adobe Encore create Flash .flv video files, but don't tell you details about the settings beyond "High Quality." I'd like to see more control over FLV compression settings and metadata in CS4.

You can get a bit of info from FLV Player and VLC Media Player, although VLC has problems playing some files, including ones from Encore. Version 2 of FLV Player doesn't always show metadata, but it is prettier and plays at fullscreen with Apple-like play controls. In fact even if it plays only single files, it seems like a better player than Adobe's own AMP now in public beta.

Anyway, you can find some metadata easily in Windows XP with FLV MetaData Viewer, a property sheet extension DLL which adds 'FLV Details' tab to the file properties dialog of FLV files. This tool isn't quite free of a previous bug mentioned in earlier post File info for FLVs. If the property sheet works you won't get as much info as possible though, like the stuff shown in FLV MetaData Injector, also from the Manitu Group. With this tool you can generate an XML report showing the share of audio and video data rates.

I think that the audio portion of Encore's FLV is unnecessarily large, and I don't always want a 29.97 frame rate. There's more on these output settings in the technote Adobe Flash export in Encore CS3, but I'd like to see more control over FLV compression settings in Encore CS4.

No comments: