I'm building a flash site (as3) with large videos that act as transitions from section to section. The videos don't scale; in order to accommodate users with large monitors, we're planning on playing back HD video and only showing users the center of the frame (depending on their screen size). That is, there will be a central area of roughly 1024×768 that we'll assume that all users will be able to view and where most of the information will reside, but we'll want users with big screens to be able to view all of the information and the entire scene around it as well.
My question is this: does it make more sense from a performance perspective to encode the video as hi-def FLV and play it back without modification, or to encode it at a reasonable resolution and then scale it to hi-def (with smoothing) on the fly? Loading time is not an issue as all clips will only be a few seconds long and will preload completely prior to playback, so the bottleneck will likely be on the playback side of things.
Many thanks!
Best Answer
I think it depends what your clients want - is their target audience the type of people to have more modern computers? Then go for HD. If it's important to the client for the site to reach the broadest market possible, then go for scaling up, but with the understanding that you'll lose quality. I'd also suggest implementing bandwidth detection: http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flashmediaserver/3.0/hpdocs/help.html?content=00000072.html, although I guess that's not on the playback side of things.