- Flash Video is Accessible and Fast
- It's Easy to Generate Flash Video
- Flash Video Can Be Adjusted for Download Speed
- Flash Video Can Have Near CD-Quality Audio
- You Can Generate A Variety of Flash Player Skins
- In Summary
Flash Video Can Be Adjusted for Download Speed
The real power of Flash Video lies in the powerful encoding technology that produces much smaller (and therefore faster downloading) video while retaining video quality.
Flash Video uses the cutting edge On2 VP6 technology to compress video (alternately, you can use Sorenson Spark, a somewhat older technology that’s not quite as efficient at compressing audio files, but is supported by older versions of the Flash Player).
When you use the Flash Video Encoder to compress audio with On2 VP6, you have a wide set of quality options. You can produce FLV video files for the web that do not lose any quality compared to your original MOV or WMV files, but the FLV files will be substantially, sometimes radically smaller. Or, you can produce lower-quality video files in FLV that are even smaller, and download even faster. Or... you can do both. As I noted earlier in this article, I often provide two versions of a downloadable Flash Video—one at maximum video quality, one at reduced (but faster downloading) quality.

Figure 3 Choosing video compression quality in Flash Video Encoder.