Adobe Media Encoder presets for MP4/F4V

Before you read this post, you may want to refer to two previous posts on related topics:

• FLV, F4V or MP4 - what file format should you choose for encoding your videos for playback in Connect.
• Tips on encoding video for Adobe Connect (plus some presets) - this post covered Flash Video (FLV) encoding only, although most of the tips covered would apply to H.264 MP4/F4V content as well.

With Adobe Connect 8 Service Pack 1 (8.1), we added support for playback of MP4/F4V videos encoded using H.264. By the way, the Flash Player has actually supported MP4/F4V formats since Flash Player 9, Update 3 (more on FP support for H.264 here and here).

The biggest benefit that you'll gain from using MP4/F4V videos instead of FLVs is higher quality video at lower bitrates (great for web conferencing). However, the caveat here is that the current version of Adobe Connect Mobile does not support MP4/F4V playback within a meeting room.

For those of you who use Adobe Media Encoder, I'm including some presets which I think work quite well in a Connect meeting room. One quick note - the presets are currently set to 24fps - depending on your source video, you may need to change this value. In most cases, you're OK to just change the value to the source video's frame rate. There are lots of other variables that can be changed when you export video using AME, so be sure to check out this export settings reference

• standard-h264-320x240-330kbps.epr 
• standard-h264-480x360-450kbps.epr 
• widescreen-h264-426x240-384kbps.epr 
• widescreen-h264-640x360-512kbps.epr 
• widescreen-h264-854x480-900kbps.epr

Is there another tool that you use to encode your videos? Let me know what you're using and I'll try to build some similar presets.