I am having a real issue with the quality of flv output. We are running on Ubuntu Studio. The best way to describe is to show you exactly what I mean:

Kdenlive 600 kbps two pass:

http://www.humanrightstv.com/law-works/287/1262

Premier Pro 500kbps:

http://www.humanrightstv.com/mexico/286/the-world-as-it-should-be

We have been trying to get off of Premier and rely solely on Kden but I need to get this quality issue right before I make the final push. Any help or advice would be very gratefully received.

1. Those are two DIFFERENT clips, so it is impossible to compare anything...

2. FLV is just a container... Are you using the same codec?

Which Kdenlive / MLT version? Also, would be helpfull if you post the rendering profile parameters here.

Marco, they are two different clips but I can see the qualitative difference. The kdenlive clip is blocky. It is blocky even though the majority of the image is immobile. The Premier clip is better quality even though the camera moves around and the subjects are equally mobile.

No, I am probably not using the same codec as the Premier clip is Sorenson and the Kdenlive clip I am unsure what the codec actually is.

Perhaps if I rephrase my question: "How can I go about improving the quality of render in flv that I am getting from Kdenlive?"

Is there anything I should be doing here?

f=flv acodec=libmp3lame ab=128k ar=44100 vcodec=flv minrate=0 b=600k pass=2 progressive=1

j-b-m

f=flv acodec=libmp3lame ab=128k ar=44100 vcodec=flv minrate=0 b=600k pass=2 progressive=1

Version 0.7.5
Using KDE 4.3.2 (KDE 4.3.2)

OK, the clips are more different than I thought :-)

When I play your Kdenlive video with Mplayer it says that it is fourcc flv1,
which is H263 "sorenson" codec, and the resolution is 720x576 @ 25fps.

Your Premiere video is fourcc vp6f which is the VP6 codec, and the resolution is 640x480 @ 29.97 fps.

So a couple of suggestions:

- scale down to 640x480 (but leave it at 25 fps), if that is OK for you

- try the H264 codec (libx264). Under "edit profile" you can set a FLV format to pack it in.

FFmpeg does not have a VP6 (Flash 8) encoder, which is not as heavy as H.264, but in the developed world, most web video for Flash is now using H.264. It is _not_ recommended to use FLV for H.264 for Flash. Adobe really wants you to use F4V, which is based on MP4, but has additional metadata; however, you can use MP4 just fine (it is supported) because FFmpeg does not output F4V.