The only thing I could think of that could make video choppy provided that everything else is good is the bandwidth, so I concluded it must've been the latter. I never got a chance to ask the web hosting provider if I'm on a shared network. The videos get a pretty good amount of hits, but nothing significant to clog up web traffic. However, content must potentially travel through several servers before reaching its client computer. I figure one of the web servers had to have had a high amount of web traffic.
In any event, I decided to build my own flash player...
This presents a new problem: I built a custom flash video player that I'm very proud of. It re-establishes my confidence as a programmer, after spending all year building web pages that are trivial. I am viewing the same video on my hard drive on a full screen through web browswers comparing two different embedded flash video players, one of which can be found
here. Users must be able to view the videos on a full screen...
I see a weeeee bit of a different in quality (e.g. squares in curves become noticeable, which is a given in a full screen... but it's more evident in one of the players). It's not that bad: I would accept it, be happy, and live with it. However, this could cause a commotion because some viewers expect the quality to be that of a plasma screen TV. One bright note: I put YouTube to shame! HA HA HA!!
I built my flash player in Flash 8. I even have the source code to that other player and I'm using the exact same components. The only thing that may matter is within the Actionscript code I wrote. But even there it's widely common to stream video in this way:
var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.connect(null); //connect to NULL
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc); //create netStream Object & pas netConnect to it
vPlayer.attachVideo(ns); //attach netStream object to embedded video object
ns.play(VideoName); //play video
When I'm getting different quality in a scenerio like this, my reaction is "WTF?" I am clueless! I don't really care to dig into it because I'm sick of fooling with video. I need an explanation so I can explain why things are the way they are. Put words in my mouth...
Also, if you know if it is possible to play any video other than FLV inside an SWF, then point me in that direction. The FLV format is garbage and if I don't have to use it, I won't. The only reason I switched to Flash to begin with is because I was having mad problems last year between Real Player, Windows Media Player, and Quicktime being embedded. It was ridiculous.
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