The following table lists the supported codecs and their earliest required SWF file format and Adobe Flash Player versions. Our video hosting accounts also support a huge list of Windows Media, Quicktime, Real Media, mp4, mp3, 3gp, 3gp2 and more.

*Flash Player plays files containing H.264 and AAC that are derived from the standard MPEG-4 container format such as F4V, MP4, M4A, MOV, MP4V, 3GP, 3G2.

Flash Player 9(v 9.0.115.0)supports playback of the following subsets of the MPEG-4 standards:

Optimal settings for the BlackBerry Pearl 8100

Optimal settings for the BlackBerry 8800/8300/9000

Also note, this applies to any mp4 video as well. If you want to convert videos from MP4 to FLV, try renaming the file before you mess with transcoding the video to FLV with a third party encoding program.

“Microsoft^® Expression^® Encoder, a feature of Expression Media, offers encoding, enhancement, and publishing of rich media experiences to Microsoft Silverlight. ”

Features Include:

Better Encoding

VC-1 advanced authoring SDK integration: by adopting the new VC-1 authoring SDK, Expression Encoder 2 is able to author better quality video faster. We’ve exposed a set of presets for tuning the encoder as well as detailed settings with comprehensive tooltips for the advanced compressionist.

New profiles, and video codecs for streaming media: Encoder 2 supports a number of new modes and codecs including Quality VBR, WMA Pro (stereo), WMA Lossless, 24 bit audio and audio/video encoding stream selection.

• Improved MPEG source support: We now include an MPEG 2 decoder in the product to give a consistent story across platforms. The decoder we ship supports transport streams (so you are able to work with sources that originated from HDV cameras. Seeking performance and accuracy has been greatly improved.
• Better multi-core performance: we are not done with performance enhancements by any means but have made decent progress in Expression Encoder 2, particularly on multi-core systems.
• Improved aspect ratio handling: by default, the new Profile Adaptive mode is selected which preserves the width specified in the profile but varies the height according to the aspect ratio of the source. Translation: it just works. Additionally, when Source compression is used the aspect ratio mode as well as pixel aspect settings are fixed up to ensure source compression will just work.
• Pre-processing enhancements: the new Pre-processing palette contains a number of settings for controlling resizing (Bicubic, Lanczos, Supersampling in addition to nearest neighbor and bilinear), de-interlacing and audio options. As well as detecting the need to de-interlace from the header of the file, the user can manually override the defaults. In addition to the V1 capabilities, Expression Encoder 2 includes inverse telecine as well as a new pixel-adaptive de-interlacer. On the audio side, there is a volume leveling filter as well as a volume control.

Better Silverlight Interactive experiences

The second bucket of functionality covers improvements to Silverlight output.

• New templates: We’ve revisited both the functionality and the design of our core Silverlight Templates. As before these support core functionality such as Chapter points and close captioning and are user extensible.
• Template Parameters: We have had a lot of requests for more and easier control of how templates behave. Examples include not automatically playing (or buffering) the video, being able to control the background color of the HTML and more. In Expression Encoder 2 we’ve added parameters to templates. The parameter system is extensible enabling developers to easily expose custom things e.g. skin primary color etc.

Download Expression Encoder for Microsoft Silverlight

For this tutorial you will need a short clip of uncompressed video, including audio. You will also need Apple QuickTime Pro. You can buy a QuickTime Pro serial directly from Apple. Entering the serial number into the QuickTime player activates additional features in the software, including the ability to encode video to a variety of formats. See the “Buy QuickTime Pro…” option under the QuickTime player’s Help menu.
Once it is installed and running:

1. Load the uncompressed video clip using the player File > Open File… menu option.

2. Click on the File > Export… menu option.

3. Under the Export option choose “Movie to MPEG-4″, then click on the “Options…” button beside the Export drop down menu. (If your cell phone only plays .3gp video files, choose the 3G menu option instead of the MPEG-4 option.)

The key options are “File Format” and “Image Size.”

4. Choose MP4(ISMA) as the file format option. Although you probably will not know if your mobile phone is ISMA (a standards organization) compliant, try encoding with this option. If your device fails to play the file, try encoding with plain vanilla MP4.

5. Set the image size to the video resolution of your cell phone. If you choose the wrong size, your video may play and you will hear sound but it will have no image.

6. Select the Audio codec by clicking on the drop down menu at the top of the screen and choosing “Audio.”

7. Set the audio options to the following:

8. Upload the file to your cell phone and try to play it.

If your phone chokes on the video file, load the uncompressed file back into QuickTime Pro and try different settings to optimize the file size of the video.