Recently I had to create a website for a customer that contained quite a long video clip. After much searching around and some experimentation with wmv and divx I decided to use Flash. After all, if it’s good enough for YouTube…… Flash can achieve very good compression rates while maintaining “watchability” and was supported by a larger percentage of the population than any other format, which was exactly what I needed. The video I had to work with was 1.8 gigabytes, so the compression I needed was going to have to be pretty extreme.
Next step was to find a free (preferably) tool to do the encoding, which I figured would mean I’d lose the very latest codecs, (and right I was) but I was hopeful I’d still achieve the results I needed. (and I did.)
After much searching I came across Super which is a video processing/encoding tool that offers flash encoding as one of its benefits. This is a well designed, functional piece of software and I got what I needed from it without once needing to read any documentation. However the design of the Super pages at the eRightsoft site is deplorable beyond measure and I can’t believe it was designed by the same people that created the tool. I could not download the tool from their website no matter how hard I tried, the page just kept looping. I had no proxy, no software firewall , nothing was blocking my referrer and I tried 3 browsers (IE, Firefox and Safari), then I gave up and downloaded it from Afterdawn.
I was thinking about writing a tutorial detailing the steps I took making my videos, but it really was too easy and not really worthy of one. The only tip I could really give is to right click on a blank part of the main window to see all the config settings.
The site I worked on was finished on time (2 days) and I had a perfectly watchable 10MB flash video embedded in the page as well as offering Xvid, DivX and WMV higher quality versions available for download. Perfect!
July 4th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Super is a great tool. I’ve used it a few times and been very, very happy with the results.
I agree that the web page design is awful, but the program can be downloaded from http://www.erightsoft.com/Superdc.html after finding the “download and use” link within the red text. That’s a really good example of how not to build a web page and how to really under-sell a good product.
July 4th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Actually I got that wrong….
1. Go to http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
2. Right at the bottom of the page there is a link that reads “Start Downloading SUPER © right now” and that will take you to http://www.erightsoft.com/Superdc.html
3. The 4th red paragraph includes the link “download and use” which takes you to http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html
4. At the bottom of that page find the 4 links entitled “SUPER © setup file” and only then will you get the 26.8MB file.
That was really, really awful! Who on Earth thought that would be a good way to design a site?
July 5th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Yeah, or you could forgo the nutso design of their own website and grab the exact same version from Afterdawn. I don’t normally suggest such things, but that eRightsoft site is just… well wrong.
Besides, the program has an update feature so if there are updates, you can get them without every having to see that nasty eWrongsoft site.