Newbie FMS Output Quality

Question

Hi there.
Just installed FMS3.5 and obtain very low output quality. On
a side-by-side comparison of the capture and output ( FMS start
page ) the stream on the output size is big time choppy and
pixelized.
I read that FMS is doing automatic bandwith detection but
even that, I'm testing on localhost. Is there some specific setup
on server side ?
Thanks for help.

Answer 1

Since you're using the flashplayer as the publishing client,
you can expect crappy, blocky video at any bitrate under about
500kbps. Sorenson spark (the encoder that the flashplayer uses)
produces very low quality images at low bitrates.
Your publishing bitrate is determined by the
camera.setQuality method on the client side. If you are not
explicitly setting the bitrate, video will be encoded at the
default 128kbps... very low quality
The reason the preview image looks better than the final
image is likely because your are looking at the uncompressed camera
image in your preview (i.e attaching the camera directly to the
video object).
Also, make sure the camera supports 320x240 natively (most
do, but one never knows). If it doesn't, the flashplayer will
capture the camera at the camera's closest native resolution, in
which case the image has to be scaled to fit in a 320x240 area. Any
such scaling has a negative impact on image quality.
On the note of automatic bandwidth detection... the included
server side methods do nothing more than determine a client's
server-to-client bandwidth. It's up to the programmer to take the
results of that bandwidth test and apply it to client side
actionscript (for example, choose a specific version of a video to
play when bandwidth is limited). FMS doesn't do any sort of
recompression of streams, so you would need to publish multiple
streams at varied bitrates to take advantage of bandwidth targeted
content delivery.