Overview

Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash converts various formats to Flash SWF and FLV with great performance.  It supports almost all popular video formats including AVI, MPEG, MOV, WMV etc.  This is a great tool for converting larger video files to the smaller FLV format to allow easier to manage files for websites and blogs.

Walk Through Review

Installation – 7

Installation is fast and easy following the install wizard.  One thing you may or may not want to install is the extra decoders for Real Media and Quick Time which you will need to encode those formats.

Features – 7

There are a good amount of features included in Sothink FLV encoder that allow customizing the videos simple and effective.  If you want to crop and trim a specific area of the video file click on the Crop & Trim button which brings up an editor for the video.

You can choose different skins and colors for the video player and download more from their website.

Another cool feature is the Sothink is it includes an FLV player for watching downloaded and created FLV files.

Ease of Use – 8

This application has a nice simple user interface making navigation and use relatively easy.  Encoding a video is pretty straight forward which we’ll take a look at here.  First launch the application and browse to the file you want to convert to FLV.  If you don’t need to crop the video just continue to the next step of the wizard.

The next step in the wizard allows you to control audio and video settings.  There are several pre-defined settings or you can manually create your own custom ones.

In the next step you choose the output location of the converted video and can also tweak additional settings as well.  This is the last step in making sure all of your video settings are what you want.

While the video is encoding you will get a progress screen to monitor.

When the encoding process is complete you will be supplied with links to the directories for the created files.  In this case I created the FLV, SWF, HTML, and thumbnail files.

Performance – 7

In our tests it performed very well in quickly converting larger AVI files on a dual core processor with 4GB of RAM.  For example when we converted a 350MB video file to FLV, SWF, HTML, and a thumbnail and it took about 10 minutes.  It doesn’t take up a whole lot of memory but will definitely take up CPU cycles which may slow down older systems.

Product Support – 8

Sothink offers a lot of support on their site including personal help by submitting a ticket to customer self help with Support Forums, FAQ, and a tutorial center.  If you need help for your order, products, or technical issues there are plenty of resources available.

Conclusion

This is a great utility for converting large video files to the more manageable FLV format.  Of course the quality of the videos is less when converting to FLV but was as good as any normal non-HD video online.  It could definitely use a HD feature for higher quality but if you want to easily convert files to FLV it works very well.  It will work on Windows XP and Vista (32 or 64bit versions).

Rating

• Installation: 7
• Ease of Use: 7
• Features: 7
• Performance: 7
• Product Support: 8