The H.264 Announcement in Black and White

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I’ve seen a couple of comments in places that seem to indicate that the full news hasn’t gotten out about our support of H.264 in the Flash Player so I’m going to quote a couple of items from the FAQ that we’re releasing:
Does the addition of H.264 mean Flash Player will support HD?
Yes, Flash Player supports 480p, 720p and 1080p content encoded with either On2 or H.264. Performance will vary depending on the capabilities and configuration of your machine. In general a 2.0 GHz Mac or a 3GHz PC, with one or more processors, will deliver an optimum experience.

Will Flash Player 9 Update 3 support non-FLV files?
Yes, with this update, Flash Player will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/HE-AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2.

So basically you can play full, hardware accelerated 1080p Quicktime videos inside of the updated Flash Player. Welcome to the next generation of web video.

My ZDNet coverage here. Aral has the full FAQ.

Related posts:

  1. Video Interview with Tinic Uro Showing 1080p Video in Flash
  2. Flash Lite Announcement on Megite
  3. What are Linux Users Going to Bitch About when there is a 64 bit Flash Player?

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  • sillysilver

    oh happy day…oh happy day…:-)

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  • http://podcast.com Kosso

    This is the best news I have had in over a decade. I’m serious!

    Just about every AV webapp/cms/player system I have ever created and hacked together since leaving Director 4 for the web has led to this day.

    The best thing Apple could do now, is update their crappy implementation of SMIL (RealPlayer still has the best SMIL support, but hey – who uses Real any more? ;p) in the QuickTime player. Also fix and update the support for Flash tracks, to make interactive QT movies easier to build.

    Mind you – I suppose now they don’t have to. Flash can ‘orchestrate’ multimedia in ways more powerful than SMIL. But SMIL is still a great open standard for multimedia layout and easy interactive app building. All it ever needed was better Flash UIs and controls.

    My mind is literally buzzing over this news! :)

    Kosso
    twitter.com/kosso

  • Steve

    Hi Ryan,

    that is great! Is standard AAC also supported?

    Do you know if hinted (for rtsp streaming) files are supported as well?

    Will Flash Media Server be able to stream all these container formats? Through RTMP or RTSP?

    And would this allow other RTSP servers (like Darwin Streaming Server) to stream to the new Flash client?

  • http://suburbia.org.uk Rick Curran

    Yes, I echo Steve’s questions above! I’d like to know those answers too!

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  • Steve

    I read here (http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html) that MPEG-4 streaming from 3rd party servers will not be allowed?

    I’m sorry? MPEG-4 is an open standard, aimed exactly to solve the issue of interoperability between different products: the whole idea of MPEG-4 is that we can choose any product from any vendor and use it in combination with any other product from any other vendor, as long as both comply to the standards.

    So Adobe is tricking it’s customers again… claiming MPEG-4 support but using a proprietary (RTMP) streaming technology instead of the real deal (RTSP), and scaring off customers with remarks like ’3rd parties need licensing from us’. There’s nothing to license, stupid! MPEG-4 is not your technology to license. It’s owned by 90% of the electronic consumer devices manufacturers.

  • ben

    yes, that is some great news!
    crossref the codec developers site for more news:
    http://www.mainconcept.com/site/news-9/current-news-129/adobe.html?L=0

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Hey Steve, I’ll ask around about that for you.

    =Ryan

  • http://www.profesjonalna-reklama.pl Tomasz Gorski

    This really good news for me because I like the H.264 quality!

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  • http://julian.empiregn.com Julian Pscheid

    That’s ridiculous! Great job Adobe! I can’t even fathom where this is going to take web video. If just my stupid qwest dsl connection was faster so I can actually take advantage of streaming HD video.

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  • http://www.flex-fanatic.com Chris S

    Tinic Uro has a post that breaks it down into a nicely described summary here:

    http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

    Hope you Adobe guys are proud of yourselves…this will surely will start a whole new round of Adobe bashing from the envious :)

    The cached framework is no slouch either…..woot!

  • http://en.flash-ripper.com/ Rostislav Siryk

    Ryan, congrats with the post #1000! Great job was done, this is quite a milestone post regarding its content and number.

  • Lou

    I wonder what the licensing will be like? Sounds like one will need to purchase an MP4 license for commercial use.

  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    Thanks Rotislav! I thought this was a good post to have as number 1000 :)

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  • Matt D

    Too bad you crippled the open source support with Darwin for streaming. It makes this whole announcement, useless. So there’s no way to stream from a Darwin server to a flash client? All this does guys is make your solution even less interesting to my Company.

  • http://www.neeheeeeeeee.nl Freek

    Finally..! Full-screen video via the web. But… Let’s all pray, Adobe will not start acting like Microsoft and make us humble web developers pay for licensing..!

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  • http://www.wybory-pl.com Wybory

    Wybory 2007

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  • http://www.liderguvenlik.net/vguard_dvr.html vguard

    Nice, I’ve already been using H.264 for Cctv video before converting them into FLVs. H.264 is Digital video Recording Dvr higher quality and it results in the videos being much smaller as well, so you get faster downloads and less bandwidth used.

  • http://www.depressione.blogowice.pl/ depressione

    I do understand what you mean, Wybory :)

  • http://www.justgoodcars.com Cars

    licensing is the big question, are we really all going to pay through the nose for this?

  • http://www.privatelabelforms.com Tom

    This is an excellent news. I was looking for such a great flash player with full quicktime support. Thanks.

  • http://www.brandyourday.net/ Pet Accessories

    Are you sure Tom?

  • http://www.blogelites.com James

    I love this Adobe’s latest version of the Flash Player 9 codenamed Moviestar because it is trouble-free as previous versions. But one incident when i tried to view a site with IE7, it prompt me to install Flash Player 9 before viewing a video file-even though i had already done so.

  • http://www.nhse.org Mandy

    Great, I’ve love the quality of digital video recording using H.264 because it is of higher quality and it results in the videos being much smaller as well faster downloads and less bandwidth used.

  • http://www.a-p-c.de Miriam

    that are really good news it seems that the high quality in the internet is no farytale anymore, that “sounds” good!

  • http://www.public-push.de Brian Push

    wow cool. that are awesome news… “HD-Flash” and the ability to play a whole bunch of different formats with only the new flash-version, that is fantastic. flash is going to be the ultimate “multi-player”. i like it!

  • http://www.zawiaty.com wczasy na kaszubach

    Finally we jump into next-gen paging. Hopefully, I’ve been waiting for it very long, time to change sth in my site .BTW Ryan i envy you the Colorado views .greets