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  1. I am baffled. I need some expert advice.

    I created a video using Camtasia 6 and it does not allow the movie to be exported to FLV because FLV has become deprecated in favor of the MP4 format.
    This is fine and I understand why MP4 is a better codec.

    However, I have a client that absolutely needed the video to be in FLV format for a website, so I used SUPER to find out the details of the Camtasia video so I could render the MP4 using Adobe Media Encoder CS4 into an FLV format using the same audio and video details.

    I adjusted the settings properly to match the original MP4 video and audio and rendered it, but the resulting FLV file is very poor quality with moving objects in the video.
    I did this many times and tweaked the settings again and again, but I still get poor quality using Adobe Media Encoder CS4.

    I went back to Google for more research and I found a blog post about using FFMPEG to convert MP4 to FLV, so I gave it a try.
    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -f flv -s 640x556 -r 10fps -b 600kbps -g 100 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 -ab 93000 -ac 1 -y output600.flv

    OMG, I was amazed!
    The quality of the FLV was nearly identical to the original MP4 and the file size was almost the same.
    It only took less than a minute to encode the 10 minute MP4 video into FLV.
    The only downside was I has to go from 192kbps to 600kbps bit-rate in which I am trying to avoid.


    Questions:
    * How can ffmpeg, a free GPL software out-perform a $700 Adobe product in this scenario?
    * How come I could not produce a high quality FLV from Adobe Media Encoder CS4 without making the video bit-rate very high (1mbps+)?
    * How do I achieve the same high quality (near DVD) Camtasia 6 MP4 video in Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere or Adobe Media Encoder at such a low bit-rate (192kbps)?

    The attached image shows the output of Camtasia 6. Its quality is near-dvd. crystal clear with no artifacts.

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  2. I'm a MEGA Super Moderator Baldrick's Avatar
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    Did you use avc/h264 video in adobe media encoder? And tried different "quality"-settings if available.

    Or maybe adobes h264 encoder is just crap. I have only used the free x264 encoder to make mp4 for my flash projects. I haven't found a method to make flvs using it yet. A mp4 to flv muxer maybe exists.
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  3. Did you use avc/h264 video in adobe media encoder? And tried different "quality"-settings if available.
    Yes. I also tried all types of settings.

    Attached is a picture of a moving vault door handle.

    Notice how crummy it looks after I encoded with the same settings as the camtasia video.

    (FFMPEG on left and Adobe Media Encoder CS4 on the right)

    Are there no decent video editors that can produce high quality at low bit-rates?


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  4. OK I copied & pasted from the other thread https://forum.videohelp.com/topic364928.html because this one was locked....

    1) .mp4 is just a container and it can "hold" different formats. Similarly .flv is just a container; it can "hold" different audio & video formats. The specifc format that you used for the Camtasia output was h.264 or AVC, which offers high compression for video , and aac audio - providing high compression for audio

    2) the h.264 part of ffmpeg is based on x264 encoder which is the open source implementation for h.264. It is constantly being refined and developed, improved. The Adobe product is licensing Mainconcept h.264 encoder, your Camtasia 6 output also uses a licensed Mainconcept h.264 encoder. Theoretically, if you used the same settings for Adobe Encoder and Camtasia 6 you should get the identical output. No offense, but there must be user error on your part. Mainconcept's encoder has not had much development over the last year, it is pretty much the same. Mainconcept was bought by DivX and the Divx 7 encoder is based on the Mainconcept h.264 encoder, just re-wrapped.

    3) If you want to, you could export a lossless intermediate (e.g. huffyuv, lagarith) from Vegas, Premiere and then encode using Camtasia 6 - but again, that would be useless because they use the same encoder. (assuming you have the mainconcept plugin for Premiere, it's an addon, not included)

    4) Find out WHY your client "needs" .flv wrapper, because you can just losslessly re-wrap your Camtasia 6 output with ffmpeg (no re-encoding, same quality, same filesize) - i.e. is it because s/he cannot use h.264 or aac audio because of their application? Is it incompatible with some formats? Because all applications based on Adobe Flash for streaming can use the h.264/aac/.mp4 format ever since 9.3... So there must be a reason

    You can use the following:

    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.flv
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