but when uploaded to YouTube it is jerky.[/quote]

That would be likely due to dropped frames, see info above. It will also depend on the browser, Firefox has historically had great difficulties with stuttering of Flash content.

Less powerful machines will have trouble playing at 30 fps anyway, most won't have hardware acceleration.

You can try experimenting with HTML5 playback to avoid Flash issues:<iframe width="720" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TS_N6tKtC6Q?html5=1"></iframe>

Then there is the inherent h264 decoder problem. Even if video above is downloaded, playback may not be completely smooth. Choosing proper IBP frames, buffer lengths and such is a science in itself, even under ideal conditions.

IMHO, mpeg1 is about as far as one can go to reliably present video, but one is stuck with 320x240 resolution. MPEG2 will likely work as well, since DVD decoding is fairly optimized these days for software playback, there's only the royalty issues so it's not a good universal choice.


But simply put, web video is cheap first, nothing else second. Fortunately, almost nobody will notice it. Test have shown that even for games, few can tell difference between 30 and 60 fps, so the latter is simply redundant. For video, 60fps is even perceived as worse.

If you intend to target large audience, author your content at 30 fps. Jitter cannot be reliably solved.