Adobe Announces H.264 Support in Flash

[MacRumors]

Adobe is releasing an update to their popular Flash Player 9 with support for the H.264 video codec.

The updated support will allow Flash Player to take advantage of hardware acceleration provided in computer video cards and is also optimized for Dual-Core processors.

Support for the H.264 standard will lead to more Web video content being available in high definition, Randall said. He said Adobe chose to support the standard now because it is being adopted more by content producers and media distributors like cable companies.

A public beta will be available today at labs.adobe.com, with a final release expected in the fall.

Apple supports H.264 as a standard codec in Quicktime. Meanwhile, Apple and Youtube struck a deal in which Youtube has been encoding their content into H.264 for playback on Apple TV and iPhone. This H.264 content has only been available to Apple TV/iPhone users, but Youtube could conceivably start offering the H.264 content to web visitors with the latest Flash plug-in.

Article Link

[flopticalcube]

Wow! Rumors are coming fast and thick now!

The updated support will allow Flash Player to take advantage of hardware acceleration provided in computer video cards

Like the new HD 2600's in the Alu iMacs!

[Multimedia]

Looks like H.264 is gaining support from all over the place now.

[drayon]

GREAT- Hi-Def advertising and annoyances just what we DON'T NEED!!!!

[Asar]

flash for iphone, here we come

[todd2000]

This is all well and good, but I wish they would get off their arses, and release a UNIVERSAL BINARY of Shockwave Player already! This is getting ridiculous. Yes I know about Rosetta Emulation Mode, but it's slow, and it crashes, with the games I try to play.

[Telp]

What exactly does this mean for the iPhone exactly.

[note235]

now maybe we can see all flash things?

[arn]

it probably doesn't mean anything for the iPhone.... however, if many sites start adopting h.264 encoding, it could open the door to better Flash support on the iPhone. In that, the iPhone has hardware decoders for h.264 but not the normal flash encoding.

Apple reportedly told developers the lack of hardware decoding was one of the reasons for not including Flash... in that doing all the decoding in software burned a lot of battery life.

arn

[NewSc2]

Originally Posted by Telp

What exactly does this mean for the iPhone exactly.

exactly exactly? Grammar aside, what does this mean exactly? Will other websites be able to program flash movies to H.264, or can we even do H.264 games, and view these all on the iPhone?

Or does this just mean flash has a different encoding technique, and still has to be reconverted to a different format to view on the iPhone.

EDIT: Never mind, arn just answered it above.

[DoFoT9]

its about time they finally added this support and got with it!!

[DaftUnion]

Hopefully a lot more media sites start using h.264 in the coming year.

[samh004]

Can the news story be updated when the beta is available... I went over but the latest release appears to be from June, so I took it that wasn't the release.

[aLoC]

I watch a lot of trailers on apple.com and have to say h.264 is *not* actually that good of a codec.

I mean I know it has all the hype and all but I nearly always notice artifacts especially when there are large areas of black in the image.

Sorensen (was that the name of the older codec?) *just looked better.* Should we or should we not all jump on the bandwagon of a bad thing?

[Peace]

Originally Posted by aLoC

I watch a lot of trailers on apple.com and have to say h.264 is *not* actually that good of a codec.

I mean I know it has all the hype and all but I nearly always notice artifacts especially when there are large areas of black in the image.

Sorensen (was that the name of the older codec?) *just looked better.* Should we or should we not all jump on the bandwagon of a bad thing?

HUH?

[JackAxe]

Cool. I've been wanting h.264 support.

<]=)

[DoFoT9]

Originally Posted by aLoC

I watch a lot of trailers on apple.com and have to say h.264 is *not* actually that good of a codec.

I mean I know it has all the hype and all but I nearly always notice artifacts especially when there are large areas of black in the image.

Sorensen (was that the name of the older codec?) *just looked better.* Should we or should we not all jump on the bandwagon of a bad thing?

lol do you know what you just said??

[un1ty]

As a Flash developer, this is great news. I won't have to encode FLV's anymore, and just encode H.264 versions. It was very smart of Adobe to do this.

I can't help but think that this seems to be some kind of positioning with Apple. The iPhone, which doesn't support Flash, does support H.264. Also, according to MainConcept, the creators of the decoder being used by Adobe, they licensed the x86, PowerPC and ARM (iPhone Processor) versions.

Here's some more interesting information form Adobe.

http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/wh...on-web_20.html

Also note that we support the 'covr' meta data stored in iTunes files, these are also accessible as byte arrays.

Meta data stored in the 'ilst' atom. This is usually present in iTunes files. It contains ID3 like information and is reported in the onMetaData callback as key/value pairs in a mixed array with the name 'tags'. ID3V2 is not supported right now.

[rcha101]

I think this is better news for youtube fans, if we (apple users) are all ready benefiting.

[SthrnCmfrtr]

Originally Posted by NewSc2

or can we even do H.264 games

I think most industry hopes are currently placed with the MP3 games we've been seeing on Digg.

[MrCrowbar]

Originally Posted by aLoC

I watch a lot of trailers on apple.com and have to say h.264 is *not* actually that good of a codec.

I mean I know it has all the hype and all but I nearly always notice artifacts especially when there are large areas of black in the image.

Sorensen (was that the name of the older codec?) *just looked better.* Should we or should we not all jump on the bandwagon of a bad thing?

H.264 is a great codec for high definition. With a high compression rate, fine grained textures like fur or sand lose their detail and look like melted. Also some of those trailers look horrible because the people making them don't know how to use it. Lots of those trailers are encoded in MPEG2 or MPEG4 before they are encoded in H.264 for the Apple trailer site, so that significantly lowers the quality. We got the same problem with cable TV here in Germany. The signal coming into my old TV is analog, but has ben reencoded multiple times on the way from the studio to my home. You see artefacts, missing keyframes, out of sync sound, interlacing lines etc. Digital technology really made TV worse around here. I don't watchi it that much anyway, so my eyeTV with a DVB-T (over the air TV in bad quality) receiver does the job just fine for me.

You'll also notice that XVid often looks better for small sized DVD rips than H.264. I found out that as soon as your material has some film grain, it takes a lot of bandwidth in H.264. H.264 is also way more demanding hardware-wise so it's taking its time to get mainstream.

[DoFoT9]

Originally Posted by MrCrowbar

H.264 is a great codec for high definition. With a high compression rate, fine grained textures like fur or sand lose their detail and look like melted. Also some of those trailers look horrible because the people making them don't know how to use it. Lots of those trailers are encoded in MPEG2 or MPEG4 before they are encoded in H.264 for the Apple trailer site, so that significantly lowers the quality. We got the same problem with cable TV here in Germany. The signal coming into my old TV is analog, but has ben reencoded multiple times on the way from the studio to my home. You see artefacts, missing keyframes, out of sync sound, interlacing lines etc. Digital technology really made TV worse around here. I don't watchi it that much anyway, so my eyeTV with a DVB-T (over the air TV in bad quality) receiver does the job just fine for me.

You'll also notice that XVid often looks better for small sized DVD rips than H.264. I found out that as soon as your material has some film grain, it takes a lot of bandwidth in H.264. H.264 is also way more demanding hardware-wise so it's taking its time to get mainstream.

you forgot that they support variable block sizes!!! i.e. 4x4 here, 16x16 there. i like that feature

[MrCrowbar]

Originally Posted by DoFoT9

you forgot that they support variable block sizes!!! i.e. 4x4 here, 16x16 there. i like that feature

Yea, there's a ton of options there, but most people. even pros, don't know about them, or don't know how to use them. For quicktime pro users, there's no way to access those options. I'd love to have an app that renders a few second preview of the movie so you can adjust the options to match the material best quickly. Simple UI: move slider, click "preview", see the new video next to other encodes and the original. Why not a method that automatically compares the encode to the original and tweaks the sliders itself....

[DoFoT9]

Originally Posted by MrCrowbar

Yea, there's a ton of options there, but most people. even pros, don't know about them, or don't know how to use them. For quicktime pro users, there's no way to access those options. I'd love to have an app that renders a few second preview of the movie so you can adjust the options to match the material best quickly. Simple UI: move slider, click "preview", see the new video next to other encodes and the original. Why not a method that automatically compares the encode to the original and tweaks the sliders itself....

oohhhh my god that would be incredible!!!! there are tha many features about h.264 that no1 is taking advantage of. i would love for there to be a quaility program to do that.

[Small White Car]

Originally Posted by aLoC

I watch a lot of trailers on apple.com and have to say h.264 is *not* actually that good of a codec.

I mean I know it has all the hype and all but I nearly always notice artifacts especially when there are large areas of black in the image.

Sorensen (was that the name of the older codec?) *just looked better.* Should we or should we not all jump on the bandwagon of a bad thing?

ANYTHING can look good or bad depending on what data rate you use. Comparing the best Sorensen to any random web-H.264 doesn't make much sense.

H.264 can be scaled from web video to iPod video to HD DVDs or HD satelite TV.

Just because you're looking at some web videos where the owner has (reasonably) decided to make their downloads as small as possible, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the format.

Have you ever heard of HD Sorensen? You know why you haven't? Because the files size would be WAY larger than an H.264 HD file. It's just not going to work.