Which brings us to the point of compression software. There are a couple of interesting packages:

1. The Flash VideoEncoder, which comes with Flash CS3 ($699,-).
2. Sorenson Squeeze for Flash MX ($119)
3. The ON2 Flix Encoders (from $69 - free demos)
4. The RivaVX FLV Encoder (Free, just for Windows)
5. The VisualHub Video Converter (just for MAC, free trial or $25)
6. The ZamZar website (free conversion).
7. The HeyWatch! website ($0.10 per conversion).
8. The FFMPEG compression suite (Free, nerdy, command-line, all platforms)

If you have Flash MX 2004 Pro, make sure to upgrade to version of the Flash Video Exporter (Video Updater 1.2) Previous versions had less features and more bugs. The Flash Video Exporter integrates with your existing video software and is in most cases available if you export a video from there. The others packages are stand-alones that accept a wide range of video formats. As of Flash8, the Flash VideoEncoder is also standalone.

Note that many sites (eg. YouTube) offer server-side encoding of video. You can upload whatever format you want, and they encode it automatically to FLV. There are two good software packages for this. The first is ON2's Flix Engine, which supports Flash8 FLV but costs $3500/year. The second is a combination of open-source tools, based around FFMPEG. It's free, but currently only supports the inferior Flash7 FLV (plus you have to take care of installing and updating all codecs.)