Adobe Releases Flash Update Incorporating H.264

[MacRumors]

Adobe has released Flash Player 9 Update 3 which includes support for H.264 video, support for which was announced in August.

Adobe Flash Player 9 now includes H.264 standard video support, the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players, and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio capabilities. The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers.

The support for H.264 in Flash will be beneficial for both content producers and end users:
- Better image/sound quality for those content providers that elect to use the H.264 functionality.
- Hardware encoding solutions are available for content producers that can encode at better than realtime.

Though speculative, another future benefit may end up being the ability for mobile and set-top devices like the iPhone and Apple TV to be able have better access to content, as such devices that support H.264 include hardware decoders (for battery life optimization on mobile devices). Apple has stated several times that it heavily values battery life on the iPhone, and may be a key reason why a Flash plug-in has not been developed to date.

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[arkitect]

Originally Posted by Macrumors

…another future benefit may end up being the ability for mobile and set-top devices like the iPhone and Apple TV to be able have better access to content, as such devices that support H.264 include hardware decoders (for battery life optimization on mobile devices). Apple has stated several times that it heavily values battery life on the iPhone, and may be a key reason why a Flash plug-in has not been developed to date.

Fingers crossed.
Cannot wait for Flash to make it to the iPhone…

[ppc_michael]

Sweet! Do you think YouTube will be migrating to H.264 for its website (I know they do this for iPhone/iPod Touch already)?

[ilogic]

will it mean I can play flash games from my iphone? Noob Question, is the encoding of Youtube done for the iphone done in H.264? So what does it all mean?

[chr1s60]

I really hope Flash gets on the iPhone soon. As long as they do something about the battery life issue, I think it will be ok. I would love the ability to play Flash videos on my phone and Flash is needed for quite a few sites in order to view anything. Some people couldn't care less about Flash, but I think it is needed in order to offer the full internet.

[dernhelm]

Originally Posted by chr1s60

I really hope Flash gets on the iPhone soon. As long as they do something about the battery life issue, I think it will be ok. I would love the ability to play Flash videos on my phone and Flash is needed for quite a few sites in order to view anything. Some people could care less about Flash, but I think it is needed in order to offer the full internet.

As long as they also offer the ability to turn OFF Flash, I have no issue with them supporting it.

For me, Flash ads are _more_ annoying than popup ads, and are unavoidable without some sort of Flash blocker add-in (a la Camino). Build in a flash blocker to Safari, and I am with you 100%.

[ifjake]

hulu.com, NBC and Fox's joint streaming site, already uses it for their new "HD Gallery", which only consists of movie trailers. Being HD, the requirements for use are pretty steep. Doesn't even run on my G4 powerbook. Quicktime runs okay at 720p for me, frame rate suffers just a little, but 1080 is too stuttered. It would be nice if H264 became the flash norm, and specialized hardware H264 decoders could be cheaply built into the least of graphics processors (on board graphics, mobile graphics like the iPhone), so that processor requirements could be relaxed a little and your barebones devices could do HD without having to be multi-super-not-cheap-core.

[iSee]

I've been suprised how little I miss Flash on the iPhone.

But I still hope this somehow means the Flash player is a little closer to the iPhone.

[JFreak]

This is great news!

[Stridder44]

Wow these seems to run a lot smoother!

[InLikeALion]

Originally Posted by ilogic

will it mean I can play flash games from my iphone? Noob Question, is the encoding of Youtube done for the iphone done in H.264? So what does it all mean?

It will not mean that you can play flash games on your iphone. h.264 encoding in flash is simply a movie codec, as far as I can tell, and does not offer the interactivity of flash that games would require. Essentially, i believe, it is like flash now has the ability to be a media player of h.264 video, but any interface/interactivity elements will still be subject to .swf files?

Can someone who knows more about the technical side of this clarify? I'm just beginning to do flash programing and don't quite understand all the ins and outs.

[chr1s60]

Originally Posted by dernhelm

As long as they also offer the ability to turn OFF Flash, I have no issue with them supporting it.

For me, Flash ads are _more_ annoying than popup ads, and are unavoidable without some sort of Flash blocker add-in (a la Camino). Build in a flash blocker to Safari, and I am with you 100%.

I think the ability to turn off Flash will be included if it ever comes to iPhone, it just makes sense. As far as the ads go, I agree that they are annoying, but they aren't nearly as frustrating as being out somewhere and needing some info from a site and finding out it is a flash based site and your phone is useless.

[Eidorian]

Works in Leopard.

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3)

I'm still looking forward to flash compatibility with the iPhone.

[Yvan256]

Good news since it means the whole industry is accepting H.264 as the new video standard.

Perhaps now those with .wmv and .avi/DivX files on their websites will replace them with H.264

I'm looking at you, Blizzard!

[longofest]

Originally Posted by iSee

I've been suprised how little I miss Flash on the iPhone.

But I still hope this somehow means the Flash player is a little closer to the iPhone.

I don't miss Flash too much in websites, but I do miss some TV content on my iPhone and TV. With NBC disappearing from iTunes, I'd like to be able to view Hulu or something like that from iPhone or TV.

[ale500]

All that sound very nice, but did they fix the problem with the printing engine in flash ?, and the bug that causes application controls in tabs to not get initialized even if they are shown ?, and the bugs that cause Sprite not to render anything ?, the list goes on...

[happydude]

looking forward to jumping into the iphone pool in the next version, so hopefully the battery issue will be solved for both flash (what about flash takes up so much battery) and 3G. however, with pop up flash ads, i hope they have a preference to be able to turn flash capability on and off.

[BornAgainMac]

Had the iPod not gone video, I bet we would live in a Microsoft Windows Media Format world. H.264 seems to have won. I love seeing so many third-party tools to convert from WMV to this new standard for the average Joe.

[dashiel]

if anything this signals a longer wait for flash.

at some point this year a three way conversation happened between google, apple and adobe that resulted in google converting their entire youtube library to h.264. google then told adobe they don't plan on supporting duplicate libraries in .flv and .h264 and adobe would need to accommodate them.

i don't believe this was entirely altruistic on google's part mind you, i suspect google was very interested in not being locked in to flash to play video on their android platform.

also adobe was almost certainly working on some form of HD support to compete with microsoft's silverlight.

returning to my initial point though, now the most ubiquitous video player in the world will support a a video format that is also supported by the iphone. in other words there will be even less need to support flash on the phone than there was yesterday.

[EagerDragon]

Any word on the release of this in the stand alone player?

[wiseguy]

This is great news for multimedia publishers, now we can put interactive layers over H.264 movies in Flash. No need to convert to .flv anymore. No more time wasted to please .wmv player or .flv player, now the standard will be H.264, for Web, HD, DVD, mobile... finally... Now it's time to make a standard between HD DVD or Blue Ray and everything will speak the same language...
I'm sure next Quicktime update will be Flash compatible.

[FightTheFuture]

i'm hoping that this helps educate the majority of people who think windows media is the best method of encoding video right now - it may help bring focus to how quicktime has been using h264 for sometime now, and break away the conception that quicktime is a media player in the same league as realplayer... ugh. very annoying.

Originally Posted by BornAgainMac

Had the iPod not gone video, I bet we would
live in a Microsoft Windows Media Format world.

i'm not so sure it was the iPod as much as flash (youtube) that kept video content sites away from windows media.

even though its already planned for netflix's 'watch now' feature to go to Silverlight, i hope they may consider flash+h264 as a good method of delivering DRM streams too.

[WolfgangK]

this is great news...I hope that this does lead to some level of compatibility on the iPhone, even if it's just for Flash video. Also, as said, needed to compete with Silverlight.

Slightly off-topic, what do people think about Apple supporting Adobe/Flash technology in the face of competition in this arena from MS?

Apple and Adobe sure seem to have a cantankerous relationship sometimes...when it seems that the alternative would put them in even more formidable positions in their respective markets. I know that's a whole 'nother debate. But I would think they'd want to see Flash succeed against competition from MS.

[paddykev]

Will this update help prevent my MBP fans going crazy at times when viewing Flash websites.
I haven't noticed it as much since upgrading to Leopard but on occasions i still notice that the fans start to kick in when viewing lots of flash on websites... and no im not viewing pr0n