Is There a Practical File Size Limit For Streaming FLV?

[phild]

I know it's always a trade off between quality and streaming speed but is there a "rule of thumb" file size not to go beyond for an flv file?

Been playing around with the settings in Sorenson Squeeze 5 for the last few days. Found a quality I'm happy with - the resulting file size is about 50MB. The videos are 7-10 minutes long with the following settings:

- 448 x 336
- 768kbps data rate
- 20 fps (original shot in 25 fps)
- 80kbps / 22050Hz audio

Thanks for any input you can give.

[poisondeathray]

1) It depends on your audience. If they are in London, UK they probably have access to broadband. If they are in rural India, chances are they might only have dialup, in that case you would want to go with a smaller less extravagant flash video

2) Bandwith costs money. If you are super rich and don't care, or if this is for a big corporation (like Apple movie trailers), or a "free" hosting site, then by all means, go all out.

3) Honestly, hardly anyone uses .flv for "quality" streaming anymore. You can use h.264 video / aac audio / .mp4 container for streaming flash with Adobe Flash 9 update 3. You will get better quality (audio & video) AND smaller size by choosing this over Sorensen. The downside is it takes more CPU power to encode and decode. Have a look here for comparisons, links to examples & more info
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic355118.html

Baldrick also put up a tutorial
https://www.videohelp.com/guides/how-to-convert-any-video-to-high-quality-flash-mp4-wit...te-id1082#1082