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Flash Player 9 Gets H.264 Support
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Aug 21, 2007 07:52 AM
from the game-changer dept.
from the game-changer dept.
ReadWriteWeb alerts us to the release later today of Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2, codenamed Moviestar, which will support H.264 standard video as well as High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) and other improvements. Adobe engineer Tinic Uro, who works on the Flash Player, has more technical detail on his blog.
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Flash Player 9 Gets H.264 Support
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Is this for YouTube? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is this for YouTube? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
So, in a nutshell, I'd say use h.264 and ask whatever users you have that aren't youtube addicts to upgrade nicely. You might save some money (and heck, if they have pay for play connections, the users will too
(Note that this advice assumes you're not serving up HD content.)
Re:Is this for YouTube? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.vtbsd.net/)
I'll update Flash once Adobe gives me a version that works. For now, I'm stuck with version 7 for a different OS, thunked in with some hacked-up compatibility layer. Every day, more and more websites are inaccessible to me.
Flash is bane on the internet, giving a proprietary stranglehold to a single commercial company. It turns Adobe into another Microsoft and Flash becomes its "IE"... the more people they can get to use Flash, the more control they have over the keys to the internet, granting them only to whatever OS and browsers they feel like producing Flash plugins for.
Little of what Flash is used for even requires Flash and could be done with modern OS-agnostic DHTML. Sadly, too many web designers are sucking Adobe's dipstick.
Re:DHTML audio capability? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.vtbsd.net/)
Most sites using Flash are using it for such mundane purposes as doing mouseover/expanding menus and other simple interface mechanics that not only can be done with DHTML, but can be done simpler with broader browser compatibility and faster page-load times (less bytes on the wire). In fact, a site's basic interface and navigation should never require a plugin. Plugins should only offer added content.
Re:DHTML audio capability? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll agree with you on the first point, but for simple interface stuff, I've actually produced many Flash solutions that required a less bytes than the canned "multibrowserconfigurableexpandingmenus.js" stuff people use.
Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.rabbitears.info/)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://kirindave.tumblr.com/ | Last Journal: Friday December 19 2003, @01:35PM)
Imagine if the web became that way, as well. Dark times.
But the H.264 issue is different. Basically Adobe has said, "We are adopting a not-awful codec for our video playing, seeing as how flash video is popular but large distributors of video (YouTube) have shown that they will leave the format to hit the mobile and embedded space if need be.
So now Apple, Adobe, Google, Sony and Toshiba have standardized on QuickTime enclosures (mp4) with H.264 video and AAC audio (when compressed, HD discs can use much less lossy encoding when they want to). How long do WMV and WMF have to live? Now that Flash can play high-quality HD video (and extremely-small-file-size SD video), and preparing with one codec can prepare for everything from phones to HD televisions, what appeal does Microsoft's codecs and containers have? Surely no one can suggest that Windows Media Player has better deployment than Adobe's Flash?
Ads (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ads (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.agileagenda.com/)
Re:Ads (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.mrnaz.com/)
T minus... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.demolicious.org/)
Actually, a million seconds is less than two weeks, that's far too quick!
Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)
* The BMW website
* Countless links to clips on Youtube
* Advertising banners
* Homestar runner
Some of these things might have been mildly useful, but I can't say I really miss any of it. I'm not sure having the Flash player installed is worth the annoyance and distraction it usually ends up driving me to. If I'm honest, Flash player has seen the most use when I've been bored, depressed, procrastinating or similar.
I'm quite enjoying being Flash-free.
You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.altiva.fr/)
It's a 64 bit plugin, that spawns a 32 bit shell running the Flash plugin.
Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 29 2006, @06:44PM)
firefox-bin: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
I'd say you're wrong, sport.
I`m confused (Score:2)
(http://lives.sourceforge.net/)
Still no 64 bit (Score:1)
(http://www.nada.kth.se/~orre)
not sure if this is true or not (Score:3, Interesting)
You can see a proof of concept at the site, and it's quite interesting to watch. This happens inside your firewalled network, just by browsing the internet.
http://hackersblog.itproportal.com/?p=720 [itproportal.com]
YouTube (Score:2)
(http://www.coppit.org/)
Yes, but support for other stuff? (Score:1)
(http://www.midnight-labs.org/)
And in the first place, why couldn't they have used an open standard that every already supports, if they had've done you'd see hundereds of Flash based VoIP applications out there already.
I don't mind Macromedia Flash, but it's just not open enough for my liking
64bit Linux Version (Score:1)
Download link available? (Score:2, Interesting)
The version of Flash from this page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9 [adobe.com] seems to be a beta version from June 11.
Yes, but does it get x64 support? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.llabmik.net/ | Last Journal: Monday March 21 2005, @04:31PM)
WHEN ARE WE GETTING A 64-BIT FLASH PLAYER FOR WINDOWS???? XP x64, or Vista x64. Hell, even a crappy beta would be fine.
It's been four @#$%ing YEARS since Windows XP x64 came out. It's time to quit making excuses. It's time to shit or get off the pot. Maybe it's time for Silverlight instead?
The mobile world (Score:2)
In most mobile standards (e.g. 3GPP, DVB), and also for IPTV, H.264 is the required video codec. So unless an environment can support it, one way or the other, it is not relevant for implementing services with it. This was a drawback of Flash in the past, I reckon it's now back in the race. With H.264 and AAC capabilities, it is possible to implement mobile (video/TV) clients. And: as Flash is supported on many different devices, you can use it to offer a service that is available on PCs, mobile devices (phone, PDA), set top boxes,
Took Adobe a while to realize that without H.264 the road will be rocky, no matter how good their supported video codec is, just because it's not in the standards.
Hardware Acceleration (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it Windows-only? Probably.
Does it use DirectX video acceleration APIs (do they handle H.264) or maybe OpenGL shader (GLSL) offload? If it's the second, it would have a chance for Mac and Linux support too.
Full Screen/Theatre Mode (Score:1)
Will it have a STOP button? (Score:1)
Flash really sucks. It was bad a little while after its introduction, but has only become more of a pain unless you have a brand new PC and are viewing a site kind enough to only embed one instance of Shockwave / Flash. What it needs is an off switch since on a lot of movies you can't even right-click and unselect "play" anymore.
Where to for YouTube alternatives? (Score:2)
(http://kapitalmototv.co.uk/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 22, @04:50AM)
Prior to launch we discussed long and hard what video codec and format to go with. In the end we decided on H.264 encoded QuickTime files with AAC audio. Primarily we made this choice so that we were offering higher quality video than was available on the likes of YouTube, while understandably taking a hit on the QuickTime install base when compare to Flash.
Now, this recent Flash development could be a good thing in the sense that all our existing H.264 files can now be used in the new Flash Player, which would significantly increase the install base for users who can view our content.
However, if YouTube starts offering H.264 files, and thus increasing quality, where to now to provide a compelling differentiator for Kapital Moto TV?
Of course we still have the niche content, editorial control over the content and an existing userbase, but for all intents and purposes YouTube has caught up when it comes to viewing experience.
Do we simply start offering larger resolution files? 640x480 for example. What are the other differentiating options?
Has to do with the deal they made with Apple (Score:3, Informative)
my 2 cents (Score:3, Informative)
this is definitely a game changer, although it doesnt seem like it is getting picked up by the major blog/media sites. It simply comes down to how this will affect the economics of producing good web video and monetizing it. in a nutshell, on2 basically gave away the decoder to adobe for the flash player but kept major control over how the encoding tools could be used. They essentially jacked up the fees on encoding to make their money thinking they had a free ride on this one, and with the rise of web video / youtube, their stock price soared in the past 2 years. The big advantage they have over the other guys in flash video, ie, sorenson, was quality --- notice youtube's quality is not that great, even though the file sizes are comparable? It's cause they use ffmpeg on the backend to transcode video to the flv format. The obvious question now, IS --- why doesnt youtube use on2's superior vp6 codec and get the pretty video? Becuase ffmpeg cant legally support it (I dont think, but ive seen hacks) and to license from on2 is just not economically feasible from a business standpoint (disclaimer: I do not know anyone at youtube, but we have ran into similar problems with our product, and I'm extrapolating their situtation with the logical conclusions.).
I sorta figured someone out there was gonna get ticked that there was a gatekeeper sitting on a major web tech, and I knew something had to give. I think the first clue should have been the fact that youtube was transcoding everything over to h246, but I figured that was initially just for my personal enjoyment on my iphone. <grin/> Apparently they knew a few people over at adobe. The second clue, and you cant keep things like new major codecs in the worlds most dominant web video platform a secret --- was that on2's stock price has dropped from around $3.69 three months ago to $1.48 as of this morning.
so. where does that leave web video? Well, as soon as I saw the news last night, I began checking the legal issues with transcoding to h264 for our project (does ffmpeg support it, cost, etc) and apparently, its a very accessibly standard. It's going to work with the existing netstream and video objects (whether you like them or not! whats up with the stuttering issues, adobe?) so our video editor should be able to mix sorenson, vp6, and h264 video content all in the same project (in real time, with effects! sorry, quick plug) which makes me very happy.
As far as the legal constraints or fees, I dont think their are any (please correct me here if im wrong, i do need to know myself). ffmpeg supports it out of the box ( apparently you can make standard h264 video files, or you can make a flv using the h264 codec, although the new file format the adobe guys are workign with seems to be superior.). For raw source code, Video Lan has an encoder: http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
I guess the big issue now is --- once we all start publishing and remixing HD content, uh, where is the bandwidth gonna come from?
Will they release the SDK in a timely manner? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What other media players already support H.264? (Score:2)
Re:What other media players already support H.264? (Score:4, Interesting)
The major confusion is that H264 is not just one standard but a loose collection of features bound up in "profiles". A player might support the H264 "main" profile, but not the "high" profile and so on. Then you've got MPEG-4 part 2 which is an earlier but unrelated stanard that DIVX / XVID are implementations of.
It's all quite confusing before even considering DRM and other implementation details. Still, the format is starting to see widespread adoption so the sooner all devices support it the better for everyone.
It will be a pain for people with lots of DIVX content, but this appears to be the way industry is going and no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long. I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.
Re:What other media players already support H.264? (Score:5, Informative)
I would call this "an overly optimistic projection by someone who doesn't follow the industry very deeply". Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. Those 2 formats don't take much processing power. Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.
I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.
Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see. If you understand this analogy, what you are suggesting
is kind of like being given a high bit rate MP3 file and then wanting to convert it to Ogg Vorbis in some mistaken belief that doing so will make it "better". Converting to H.264 might result in smaller files and maybe if you do a really good job you can't tell that the quality has dropped, but the video certainly won't be better. Given the lack of standalone H.264 playback devices, I don't know what would be hoped to be gained by this at this time. You'd only end up with a slightly smaller file that is even less likely to be able to be played back on anything but a PC.
Re:What other media players already support H.264? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no single standard called MPEG-4. DiVX is an implementation of MPEG-4 Level 2 ASP. This is a very specific codec, on top of which DiVX has its own media container format. The container is how the data is stored as a file, and the container might interleave the data with other kinds of data. For example DiVX specifies extensions for subtitles and other things.
H264/AVC is MPEG-4 Level 10. It also has some different container formats, but more importantly it's an entirely different codec. Despite that, the two standards will share certain similarities might that allow some data to be preserved during conversion. I am wondering as someone not acquainted with the details if there is any feasibility to this.
But even considering DiVX as MPEG-4 ASP, it does not imply MPEG-4 ASP capable devices can read DiVX because the file format is independent of the encoding. At the very least a tool might be required to strip DiVX content out of it's proprietary container format. There is no guarantee that a device that supports even ASP is going to play DiVX movies.
On top of that MPEG-4 SP & ASP are becoming obsolete. They're stop-gaps who've run their course. Hardware has moved onto H264 yet people are left with ripped content in the old format. Most hardware does not support XVid / DiVX container formats. Sony, MS & Apple seem disinclined to support those formats, probably for accusations that they're supporting piracy, as well as hindering adoption of H264. If you have a device that only supports H264 you need to be able to convert files to H264.
When you transcode from one lossy format, into another there is no way that the quality of the image will be improved whatsoever. data is thrown away, data that can not be recovered or magically made to appear out of thin air so that the image quality can be better. It would be better to re-encode from the original source where there is more data available for the codec to work on. Some perform better then others after all and may be able to compress more of the data then divx could without throwing some away.
No one ever said any different. I'm sure I could reencode all 30 movies I currently have in DiVX, if I have a spare month of time to do it. I'd just prefer not to if at all possible.
If you want as little data to be lost as possible when transcoding, then re-encode it into a format that is lossless (huffyuv?) or even to straight avi frames. The tradeoff is that the files become much much larger, and you will not gain any more quality then was in the original divx'd version.
I want to convert DiVX to H264, not some other format. I want to do this as losslessly as possible. I am wondering aloud if there is a way to convert data that does not involve (as much) encoding. Obviously I could just reencode them but I want to know if any data can be saved, speeding up conversion in the process. This is my question.
Re:What about theora (and dirac)? (Score:2, Flamebait)
(http://wakaba.c3.cx/)
Re:Not bloated enough!! (Score:2)
(http://www.mrnaz.com/)