It may just be that our customers are not very good designers but many of the Flash-based multimedia projects we have tested have had problems with resource utilisation. Often the video will use 2 or 3 times as much CPU and memory when it is embedded in Flash compared with playing it in a media player. I have seen this kill reasonable spec machines like a 2GHz P4 when the original video would play ok on a machine half that speed.
I just finished such a project today. One video had been compressed to three different levels to allow it to be streamed at different rates. All three videos used the same CPU and memory even though the file sizes varied by a factor of 4 to 1. It means that people with different connection speeds can make an appropriate choice but people with low-specification hardware (1GHz PIII and below in this case) cannot. We are not designers, just testers, so I don't know if there is a simple solution to this. However, we work for a lot of clever people and they often revert to a non-Flash solution. You also need to be careful how you embed your Flash content because some techniques (I believe Satay is one) are not accessible to screen readers. At this very moment I am testing a site where this happens. Unfortunately a very loud Flash-based audio track starts when the page loads and the button for silencing it is not accessible because JAWS does not even recognise that the page contains a Flash movie. Steve Green Director Test Partners Ltd / First Accessibility www.testpartners.co.uk www.accessibility.co.uk -----Original Message----- From: listdad@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jan Brasna Sent: 05 February 2007 23:47 To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Usability Questions for Quicktime > 1. What is the best way to "hide" the movie from browsers that don't > support quicktime (or from users who don't want to download quicktime)? To use an UFO/SWFObject alternative for QT, or Satay-like QT alternative w/ fallbacks. > 2. Is there a different file format which is more universal? Flash - FLV. Great compression effectiveness, 97% reach (compared to ca. 66% of QT), pretty much platform independent (sans non-x86 or x64 unix). -- Jan Brasna :: www.alphanumeric.cz | www.janbrasna.com | www.wdnews.net ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
