I agree with musajoe, .FLV is a pretty good looking format with comparatively small file sizes. In another thread, he'd recommended the Riva video encoder (to turn your "regular" video into Flash video). I tried taking an 800x600 uncompressed .avi, and compressing with a number of solutions. The uncompressed file was something like 700 megs. The smallest decent looking file I could get with quicktime was (and I didn't try every single codec) about 28 megs. That was with Sorenson 3. I didn't like the MP4 at all. As an .AVI but using Windows .MP4, I got to, if I remember correctly, 18 or 20 megs with DivX 5 and round about 14 megs with the latest build of Xvid. But it got down to 4 or 5 megs in FLV, and still looked pretty damn good. The problem with FLV files is that they won't play directly in the Flash player from a web address. At least thats the case since I use Firefox, and have refused to open IE for months. However, I did find a really simple way to stream them on this page @
VideoSpark.com.;
If you render you're .FLV at 320x240, and simply replace the references in the Index.HTML file to the .FLV file (all of them, there are several) itt works just fine. I'll probably be working on my contest entry until the last moment, but I'm pretty sure thats how I'll publish it. It's only in the last few months that I've gotten acess to a broadband connection, so I'm still really concious of making as much as possible accesible by them that don't..
--Brian