Flash webcam video quality settings

Question

I'm working on a video streaming application in Flash and I've been told I need to add quality selection tools. The requirements are "low", "medium" and "high" quality. I'm trying to figure out what kinds of quality settings to actually apply for this (framerate and video quality settings). I feel like there has to be some kind of standard for this, as I see controls like this fairly often, but I haven't been able to find any reference online for it.

Does anyone know of any standard settings for "low", "medium" and "high" qualities for a live streaming video from a webcam? Or even a good reference as a starting point to coming up with my own values?

Answer 1

It may be a better idea to just define bandwidth points and then look at your codec to identify the best quality for a given point. Then you can give each of those bandwidth points a 'normal' name. like:

• 56k is 320x240 @ 8fps and is "low quality"
• 256k is 640x480 @ 8fps and is "medium quality"
• 512k is 640x480 @ 24fps and is "high quality"

That is just my guess though.

Answer 2

I ended up coming up with some values, though they're probably not standard.

I realized after asking the question that my needs probably didn't fit the standards, as my resolution was fixed at 160x120 as that's the size of the component that was viewing the video. I just ended up using the video quality settings of 100, 80, and 60 for the different settings. Ended up being much simpler than I expected it to (I was originally thinking of mucking with framerate and resolution as well as the quality value, but it ended up not being needed).