Help encoding Flash video at correct bitrate

[bobmcinnis]

I may have posted this in the wrong forum.

I'm going to be streaming some video using Playstream and I'm messing up
somewhere. The Flash videos I'm encoding seem to be coming out at a much higher
bitrate than what I'm specifying. I need to specify three quality levels--high,
medium (<150 kbps) and low (<50 kbps).

For example, I want to set one video to 28 kilobits per second to get well
under the 50 kbps connection that some dial up people are experiencing (it's
only a 206x177 movie). There are the two different ways I'm calculating them:

1. Using Flash Video 8 Encoder:
Under Quality I set the max data transfer at 28 kilobits per second. I thought
this would do it.

2. Using a bandwidth calculator
I take the resulting 8 mb FLV file and check its size and it doesn't seem to
be encoded at 28 kbps. 8mb = 65536 kb divided by duration of 418 seconds = 157.
Isn't that the bitrate?

The other two files are doing the same thing. So, I guess the question is, am
I calculating this properly and where am I going wrong? I'm guessing I'm using
the encoder improperly.

I'd really appreciate the help.

[Pete Hughes]

I know nothing about this but suspect you need something like a Flash Media
Server that cooperates with your bandwidth commands. There, that is a lot more
than I really know.

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashmediaserver/