Flash video encoding options?

[inertia]

I'm going nuts trying to find a definitive answer on video encoding for FMS (RTMP). All the docs I've found talk about using CBR (constant bitrate encoding). But all of the tools I've tried either don't support CBR or perform so poorly that it will take months to finish the work I have.

Does anybody know whether VBR is a dealbreaker for streaming Flash videos using FMS?

- I've tried the Adobe Media Encoder included with CS4, but it doesn't like my source files.
- Sorenson Squeeze 5 does CBR, but it's painfully slow.
- x264 seems to be the winner as far as speed and the quality, but it doesn't support CBR.
- MainConcept's H264 does CBR (I think it's the same codec in Adobe's encoder), but the Pro version is $1,000. :-(

Am I missing something?

Any suggestions would be great!

[jdjustice]

Firstly, MainConcept's H.264 is part of Sorenson Squeeze 5. CBR 1-pass is the only option for passes (no 2-pass or multipass).

AME (Adobe Media Encoder) should work excellently on just about any source file providing it is not corrupted. 1-pass CBR is the only option here too.

But Bottom line is as long as you are constraining the settings for VBR so that the minimum bitrate and maximum bitrate are not too far off of your target (100%)... you should have few (if any) problems.

Some specialists have suggested that there are certain cases where VBR encoding may actually be preferable to CBR. (citation needed)

But I must disagree that the tools you mention are inferior. All of them only support 1-pass CBR which on a modern-day's CPU equipped system with minimal RAM even will run fairly rapidly even if your source files are uncompressed HD. Where time becomes an issue is with multipass VBR encoding and that I understand can be a burden.

So if you have the tools (even ffmpeg, an open-sourced encoder, will work just fine) then you should have no problem using either CBR or VBR and getting good results =)

Good Luck

J