OT: Adobe Adds support for H.264 in Flash.

[www.digitalproductionbuzz.com]

Huge!

Michael Horton
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Huge yes. Let's see how it is implemented from an authoring point of view.

This might help explain a few things if you are a codec geek and understand this stuff. Maybe Marco Solorio can find time to explain all this to us

[www.kaourantin.net]

Bottom line is we don't have to encode to flash after the Fall. That is huge. It's also sort of Adobe admitting defeat. One codec to rule them all. H.264 in .mp4 plays in QT and in Flash. No transcoding, no different versions. Same codec for the web and for the iPod/AppleTV. Sweet!

Michael Horton
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Looks good on first blush reading from someone working on it in the trenches. The Apple/Google iPhone related deal plus YouTube releasing H.264 forced Adobe's hand on this. No doubt they have been working on this for ages as the person you linked to stated.

I still want to see for myself the implementation. I was hoping to spend some time doing up some test pages using H.264 that would utilize the player but I have some other deadlines to deal with.

There are still a lot of question marks for Flash developers and authors on the inclusion of H.264.

EDIT:

It appears from Kauourantin's blog, a guy who actually works on developing the Flash Player at Adobe (as you stated Michael) that we will "just" be able to bring in H.264 in the a flash object. I am more assured than before but I STILL want to see it myself. Flash has never been a straight forward and lean exercise to develop or author.

Well QuickTime has been the laggard here as far as authoring. Hell, its 10 years behind Flash there. Never understood that.

Michael Horton
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Michael Horton Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> This might help explain a few things if you are a
> codec geek and understand this stuff. Maybe Marco
> Solorio can find time to explain all this to us
>
> [www.kaourantin.net]
> ed-to-video-on-web_20.html
>
> Bottom line is we don't have to encode to flash
> after the Fall. That is huge. It's also sort of
> Adobe admitting defeat. One codec to rule them
> all. H.264 in .mp4 plays in QT and in Flash. No
> transcoding, no different versions. Same codec for
> the web and for the iPod/AppleTV. Sweet!


Well, I don't know how close to reality (i.e., no transcoding required) that really is. I think we really have to wait and see what officially happens upon public release. For example...

The current state of FLV encoding can use two codecs: On2 VP6 or H.263. Let's say you open up a DV file in QuickTime Player Pro and export it as a QuickTime H.263 file. If you simply rename the extension from .mov to .flv, it wont play in an FLV viewer even though it's using a compatible codec. Although interestingly enough, it *will* read any embedded metadata.

What could be done (and very easily) would be to create an application that merely changes the headers of the file so that you can change it from QuickTime H.264 to FLV H.264 without any re-encoding. So with that in mind, you could export out of FCP to H.264 and then re-wrap the headers to FLV format without re-encoding (this could probably be done globally within QuickTime actually). If not, I can pretty much guarantee a free widget or app will pop up. So yeah, I guess no transcoding could technically happen, but there might need to still be an intermediary re-wrapper of sorts. If the code masters that be are kind to us, they'll implement it transparently and then all our wishes will come true. But again, we'll have to wait and see what happens.

I think this is a great move. Out of all the delivery codecs, I do have to say that I've always liked H.264 the most in terms of quality. And best of all, it'll allow Media Batch users to encode to FLV much easier across all their systems! ;-)

Marco Solorio | OneRiver Media | ORM Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Media Batch

Although after reading more of the blog link, it does look like Flash can use .mov as part of the compatible import options, which is definitely something I've always begged for. That would be very cool. No, that would be huge! =)

Marco Solorio | OneRiver Media | ORM Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Media Batch