Please smooth your video site!

Lately there’s been several great websites that are based on video. We Choose The Moon and Instant Campaign are two of them. Both these sites must have cost thousands of dollars to make, but the video looks quite pixelated. It’s actually so pixelated that it annoys me, especially since it’s so easy to fix. Have a look at the picture below.

Common for both of these sites is that they scale the content to the width of the browser. If you view any of these sites on a big screen such as the Apple 30”, this looks extremely bad and all you need to fix it is one simple line of code:

video.smoothing = true;

That’s it and your video will look much better on big screens. Doing this adds a little to the CPU usage, but this won’t matter much on the average machine.

I’ve also uploaded an example FLA that you can have a look at to test this. Just run the file to load play video. Scale the SWF and click the video to toggle smoothing on/off.

PS: sorry about the lack of updates recently. I’ve been on holidays and been quite busy with client work lately. Finally having a little free time now to experiment and play! 😊