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April 25th, 2008
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h264
smugmug
video
SmugMug gets a Flash player- and it doesn’t suck!
Earlier this evening Don MacAskill twittered that SmugMug released it’s new Flash-based video player and I must say, it’s very slick indeed. Not many folks realize that SmugMug supports video, but it does a real bang up job of it. If you’re a Power or Pro account holder, you can upload videos up to 2.5 or 10 minutes in length respectively. They don’t cheat you on the quality, either; as long as it’s less than 512MB in size, they’ll take your video up to true HD resolution (1280×720) and encode it in H.264, which is quickly becoming the most popular video compression codec.
SmugMug won’t scale your video to an ugly resolution, or artifact the crap out of it to save space on their servers. It’s just your videos, in great quality, without the bullshit.
Alright, alright; all my sweet nothings about their service aside, I really like what the SmugMug did here. The interface is sleek an unobtrusive, it’s quick to load/buffer/whatever (not sure how that works in Flash exactly, especially since you’re loading an external video file) and… have I mentioned the quality? ;)
Below is a glimpse of their new Flash-based player in “web resolution” (425×240), which I only chose because of limitations in my own site’s design. Regardless, hit up this page to see it in all of it’s HD glory.
If you want to give SmugMug a try, there’s a free 14 day trial. I recently made the switch from Flickr, and I totally recommend it.