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Flash Player 9 Gets H.264 Support
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.
So is this the corresponding software support behind YouTube's earlier announcement that they'll be serving H.264?
Now let's just hope it doesn't take an additional 6 months for this to make its way into the Linux version. Flash Player 9 for Linux came out some months after Flash Player 9 for Windows/Mac did.
Sweet, now we can be annoyed by advertisements in HD, at 100x the bandwidth!
Linux support coming in 1,000,000... 999,999... 999,998...
Actually, a million seconds is less than two weeks, that's far too quick!
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Various choices I've recently made (like using amd64, and dumping Firefox for Konqueror) mean that I've not been using a Flash player at all. So far, I've missed out on things like:
* 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.
I was under the impression that flash 9 was already using h264. If not, then what were they using before ?
You just need nspluginwrapper.
It's a 64 bit plugin, that spawns a 32 bit shell running the Flash plugin.
Maybe I have very old ideas about programming, but... why not fix the fundamental flaws in the software first, before adding features... (I thought it was only the linux 64 bit version missing, but fortunately I was wrong)
But most of the world (and me!) enjoy watching dumb clips on youtube.
:-(
That's going to mean we stick with 32 bit firefox for the moment
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Due to a design flaw in ActionScript 3 socket handling, compiled Flash movies are able to scan for open TCP ports on any host reachable from the host running the SWF, bypassing the Flash Player Security Sandbox Model and without the need to rebind DNS.
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
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
That reminds me of the time I was fired for sticking my wang in the salami slicer.
She was fired as well.
Just to correct you, Flash is a lot more than a media player.
America, Home of the Brave.
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.
Once sites like metacafe and youtube start offering their content via h.264 streams we can ditch flash for video altogether.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
youtube-dl and ffmpeg make the flv container useful, even for those without flash. For those with flash, we'd know they had the theora codec available - so flv/theora becomes a viable delivery method and flash becomes the enabling tech.
What have Adobe got to lose?
There isn't much point in converting xvid/divx/3ivx to h.264 (x264/vc) unless you're just aiming for a smaller file size; no, x264/h264 is for preserving the high quality of a video in a relatively low-size file format. Now that the flash player is getting h.264, I'm hoping it'll get something some might consider more important: mkv support and subtitle support. Ah well, here's to dreams.
As much as I hate 99% of flash content out there, I find Firefox + Flashblock works nicely. I can block all flash, yet allow it to show for Youtube and Home Star Runner, which isprecisely what I've done. If I need to access some flash based element of a page I can, otherwise it can stay off and not bother me.
So maybe finally YouTube won't look like crap. Fullscreen is a joke.
I've been waiting for ages for them to make the realtime voice codec available to anybody for development without reverse engineering their software or paying extortionate fees to a third party company who seems really reluctant to license the codec.
:\
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
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 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.
I'd be happier if they'd get up off their asses and finish a 64bit linux flash player.
Any entry level PC can manage HD output at 720p and probably higher. I really don't see the issue with a DVD player offering the same when the chances are it would be hardware assisted. Even a PSP can manage H264/AVC main at SD resolutions. We're already seeing HDMI equipped upscaling DVD players. Players that read and play H264 files cannot be that far behind. If Apple can flog an iTV which is basically an HD H264 playback device then cheaper devices are clearly not far off.
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
I want it because because DiVX was a good format but it's becoming obsolete. If it were possible to convert those files while preserving as much as possible of the data , e.g. B & I frames, the quality of the image might be better than completely re-encoding it. It would also be quicker to convert them, possibly even allowing the likes of Nero Home to transcode them on the fly. That is why I wondered aloud if you could produce a mostly lossless conversion.
At the same time as doing this they are dropping for older codecs in the new file format that supports H.264 and AAC.
All this this move is the industry moving to freshly patented formats before the patent protection drops on the old stuff. They even admit themselves that the new support isn't intended to offer improved quality, and because of the limited profile it won't.
We should fully expect to see the old FLV format discontinued in a revision or two.
Nothing more to see here. Move along.
I want to convert because the industry appears to be ignoring MPEG-4 SP/ASP and the implementations of it. For example my PS3 doesn't not support DiVX. While I could workaround this issue by firing up Linux, I'd prefer if there was a way to almost losslessly convert the format from one to the other. We all know that you could reencode the movie by decoding it one frame at a time and then reencoding it. But I am wondering if there is a way to strip the B/I frames and anything out of the data stream and save them straight into H264. Even if that means changing structures around. Not only would it mean a higher quality conversion, but it would be faster too and ideally suited for transcoding or conversion en masse.
Given that a little iPod can do the baseline profile at 640x480, I can't think that 1080 would entail a WHOLE LOT more work. OK, admittedly, it's ~4x the resolution, but we are talking about a little device. The specs for the AppleTV device say it will do 1280x1024 of h.264, so I don't think a DVD player with 1080 is out of line.
I think the GP probably has a large collection of CDs of things encoded in DivX, and is just planning ahead to the stage of being able to easily watch those on a set-top box. From the quote, they understand that there MAY be some loss, but are willing to take a little for the convenience of not having to re-encode everything. They're probably hoping that the formats are close enough that there's a simple transform or something (a la XVID/DIVX/MPEG4 being related), but they're much different than that.
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
Has anyone found the download link?
The version of Flash from this page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9 seems to be a beta version from June 11.
I'm tired of whining about this one, just ready to write off Flash as some kind of archaic technology, but maybe someone from there will ready this.
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?
divx is MPEG-4 no?I want it because because DiVX was a good format but it's becoming obsolete. If it were possible to convert those files while preserving as much as possible of the data , e.g. B & I frames, the quality of the image might be better than completely re-encoding it. It would also be quicker to convert them, possibly even allowing the likes of Nero Home to transcode them on the fly. That is why I wondered aloud if you could produce a mostly lossless conversion.
There are plenty of codec libraries which can handle that, its hardly going to go the way of the dodo. MPEG-1 is still around, and playable after all and thats from the VCD era; around the early 1990s.
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.
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.
Sure, we can use this workaround, but 64-bit is common now. We should have native ports.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It really shouldn't be a fireable offense. Unless of course you don't wash your hands before getting back to food preparation.
I hate printers.
There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264
Except for device support. iPods, AppleTV, and anything that supports this in the future as it gets more popular. Nevermind that most of our Divx content is in a craptastic container format (AVI).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Although the mentioned release is for the PC, I'd say this has a major impact on another realm: mobile devices. I'd even go so far to speculate that this is one of the main reasons for implementing H.264 (the blog just says "our customers want it").
... (a.k.a. converged services)
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.
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
At least the PSP browser only plays flash 6 and has too little memory; so, no YouTube.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The article claims that that Adobe said it will use hardware acceleration for H.264.. Are there any more details on this?
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.
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.
Minor note. 1080p is 6.75x the resolution of 640x480. (1920*1080=2073600)/(640*480=307200)=6.75
g ion/hd/
That's a lot of extra pixels.
For a better way to get the mind around the difference, go tot apple's quicktime site and look at the downloads for the HD movie trailers. compare the file size for the 480p and the 1080p. For the Last Legion trailer the difference is 49 MB vs. 150 MB. That's lots of extra info to process. http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/thelastle
In which user agents can DHTML play a sound whenever the user does something, such as playing a "rustling leaves" sound when the user moves his character next to a tree and presses the use key?
In which user agents can DHTML or SMIL synchronize an SVG animation with an audio object?
And never for the Nintendo Wii, which is a drag, it is used almost daily to view youtube at my house.
Maybe it's just the particular system I'm running for my media pc (WinXP with an old Radeon 9600Pro video card), but I cannot get flash video to run full screen on my TV. Essentially all other video has no problem fitting nicely on my TV by simply specifying theater mode in ATI Catalyst for the TV, which is set as a secondary monitor. Does anyone else have this problem or know of a work-around?
I use Opera so I can block content selectively. The typical IE + Flash user experience though is to load a site, then watch your CPU slam to a crawl as it tries to play 6 streaming video banner ads at once while some massive, page-blocking shape pops up with another instance of Flash.
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.
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?
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
H.264 was added at Apple's request. they are currently streaming h264 to iPhone ad Apple TV users, Both of these devices use H264. I don't know the agreement between Apple and utube but I'd bet Apple is helping to pay for the re-encoding of content to h264. Now it looks like they decided to take advantage of the re-encoding of their library and add h264 to Flash. It's good to move to an open standard like H264
Both HDDVD and BLU-RAY already have support for mpeg-4 avc (H.264) and quite a few discs have been released in both formats with H.264 video. This is a whole diffrent thing than divx/xvid compability on dvd players. H.264 is also used by a few broadcast companys, so there is a reason for people wanting to playback their captured streams on standalone aswell.
Granted, 1080 is 6.75 times bigger - my x4 figure compared to 640x480 was a "back-of-the-envelope" variety. Still, the fact that the built-in iPod (dedicated) chip can do 1/6th the work, and that the Apple TV can do MORE with an Intel chip means it's not out of reach for a reasonable price.
Of course, with a dedicated DVD player costing under $30 (or even $20 if you look), I have a feeling that a dedicated H.264 player might not get THAT cheap. IIRC, $9 of every DVD player is actually licensing costs.
Also: I'll grant your point on this, esp. owing as to the "system recommendations" page linked from your page: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/recommenda tions.html WOW! A Pentium D at 3GHz and a 64MB video card to watch a 1080p video!
disclaimer: I work on a startup project that is based in flash video
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?
You think most C programs people see are viruses?
Well, I guess that might be true, depending on your point of view -- C itself is a virus.
Is this where I say "Eclipse is almost as nice as my Symbolics machine", or where I say "the internet is almost as nice as when it had no ads"?
(I had started a much better comment but Firefox crashed.)
I doubt that the licencing is that much. If it was then surely someone would just stick vlc or mplayer in a box with a drive and sell it for $10.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
From what I here, Flash support in alternative devices (e.g. Nintendo Wii) is hindered by the fact that you can't get a Flash 8 SDK. I'm assuming then that YouTube currently requires only Flash 7, which implies that improved video quality (requiring a new Flash version) will break compatibility.
There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264.
You can gain free hard disk space as a trade off for a small but not noticeable loss in quality and increased processing power required to play the media.
An edit button would be nice right about now.
H.264 is great but it does nothing to address the container format like AVI, MP4, MKV. I honestly prefer MKV as it is an open spec and has a lot of nice features. AVI has been dragged along with windows and MP4 while ok, doesn't do some things well like subtitles. You can essentially dump H.264 streams into any of the three container formats (AVI is a little bit of an issue but it can be done), but because there's no standard, you end up installing all of the splitters for each of the containers. That is a pain in the ass.
They need to come up with a standard container, or a container like MKV needs to gain massive popularity. It's getting pretty annoying having to install three different components (player, codec, and splitter) to play a file. Mplayer has everything bundled but I think it could use more interface work.
Read the rest of the sentence, Captain ADD:
Thanks for the link.
The article said "the new Flash Player will be available later today" and the article is dated August 20. So I assumed the new player would be available this morning, August 21.
Apparently, the press release mentions "later today" as well, but is dated August 21.
I guess I'll have to be patient.
Yes, but that would be "under the table." Wiki says $20/player while another source shows min $4/player for the DVD spec alone. MP3, JPG, VCD, etc. support each have their own fees.
Here's another article on fees: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050120A2004.html Quote: "Xinhua Online cited the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) as indicating that China produces 60 million DVD players and exports 45-50 million of them a year, with the exported DVD players subject to a royalty charge of US$20 per player."
Yes we believe you. Though it depends on if the program in question has been written to take advantage of 64bit. For example, encoding with LAME in 64bit Linux gives no speed improvements, and is perhaps a notch slower on 64bit than 32bit (due to no 64bit nasm). But I believe LAME 4 is being rewritten to be 64bit friendly.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I doubt that you could save much. Although H264 is called MPEG-4 Part 10, and it uses the same ideas (transform, motion compensation, quantization) it uses very different algorithms to perform each step. Probably the best candidates are the motion vectors (how a block of 8x8 pixels moves over time) even then, DivX is limited to 8x8 blocks, whereas H264 can do different sized blocks (8x16, 16x16) if that matches the motion better - so you lose one of the big benefits of H264 by re-using the motion vectors.
I'd be tempted to do the re-code though. H264 should be able to give you at least a 25% improvement in file size for the same perceived quality. Depends on what you want though. I regularly recode MPEG-2 as H264 with quite a spectacular reduction in file size, and (to my eyes) a minimal reduction in quality.
I'm pretty sure H.264 support in Videolan comes from ffmpeg library.
On the subject of Flash Hating, I can tell you the deep fear lurking in every web developer's heart. One day, in a bleak and post-apocalyptic future, Adobe could own the web and web design the way they utterly own print media. They're already on the verge of this, since the vast majority of professionally designed websites use Illustrator and a bit of Photoshop to create their images. Adobe gets to charge $300-$1200 to every graphic designer who expects to be taken seriously.
The truth is: Proprietary or not isn't the question or even a big problem. It never was, even during and after the browser wars. Nobody gives a shit about any monopoly as long as the people holding it don't screw and mess around with everybody else. Imagine MS delivering a rock solid 100% css2 cross-plattform IE 5.0 for Windows, OS X and Linux back in 2001. They'd've owned the web and people would have loved them for it. MS kept screwing around *and* abusing their monopoly and got their payback for it. Firefox at 20%+ and rising. There you go.
Flash is the prime Rich Client VM on the web for a very simple reason:
It is to date by far the very best and it tries very hard not to suck.
The Flash team is so ultra conservative about security it needs MS Active X conector enforcement to make it unsafe on Windows. The plugin is even easier to install than most browsers or any other type of programm. The closest potential competitor - Java - is lagging lightyears behind in what was initially intended to be Javas key market. Even their latest semi-JMF-rebrand'n'recycle named JavaFX is way to cumbersome to use to ever gain foothold unless Sun finally get's their shit together and builds a Rich Media Client kit that doesn't suck.
Ever since ActionScript 2 Flash has been the most widespread turing complete plattform out there and just because many people can't handle it doesn't mean its evil. If Adobe would ever start to f*ck around to much after gaining a factual monopoly (which they sort of have allready) there'd be OSS alternatives almost instantly. Remember when IE owned the web? MS started screwing with the Linux, OSS and Webdev community and - Bingo! - along came Mozilla with rock-solid CSS. And suddenly nobody cared that it was a performance hog. IE had gotten so bad that Mozilla was the best. And all of a sudden we could do halfway relyable Layout without needing Flash or relying on an IE as client. Likewise with print: Adobe can own print for all eternity - as soon as they start screwing around (the still very good) Corel Draw would get a new chance in an instant.
It sure isn't very nice that there is no viable open-source, truely cross-plattform rich client that is up to what Flash can do. But frankly, people - even the OSS advocates - don't care wether software is OSS or not. If a company treats it's users and developers fair, nobody gives a hoot about that. OSS is rarely a value in itself for things other than preventing lock-in on mission critical components. Or does it really bug the p*ss out of you that your Nvidia Linux GFX drivers and the Linux binary of Unreal Tournament 3 are both non-OSS? Didn't think so.
Flash is the king of the rich client hill. And if Adobe improves on their delivery of x-plattform compatibility, performance and featureset, and doesn't water down their stuff with to much Windows-only+OS-X-late+Linux-next-millenium Apollo, Air or whatnot stunts, then Flash will continue to stay in that position. And for good reasons too. I'm also a professional Flash developer since 2001 and am allways on my toes. As soon as Adobe starts messing with me I'm outa here and telling my clients that sound + neat litte anims gotta stand back behind todays usual Ajax fare until Gnash gains some foothold (and a project site that doesn't look retarded). But as long as they play nice, deliver video that is even easyer to deploy and deliver than the entire Real pipeline I don't care very much if they own RIA, web-video and the only feasable solution for everything other that classic websites.
That's my experience from since the dot-boom anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Here's a news release with the licensing fee information, although I suppose there's a more official document somewhere: http://www.mpegla.com/news/n_03-11-17_avc.html
You didn't really think you were going to escape the content-based licensing fees they introduced with MPEG-4, did you? The good news (for you), however, is that the fee structure is fairly reasonable for your type of application. Depending on how you classify yourself, and where your revenue will come from, you'd probably end up paying nothing.
Of course, you're going to want to consult with your legal staff. But that's a starting point.
(Incidentally, sheesh. Reading all that typewriter type was mind-numbing.)
Whether the format appears in SD DVD players remains to be seen, of course. One of the HD formats might catch on, in which case why do you need H.264 playback in a SD player? On the other hand, things like iPod video might make it popular to put H.264 on regular DVDs, in which case a market will emerge. Warner Brothers proposed an DVD-9-based HD standard using the better codecs, although that apparently went nowhere.
The technology is certainly there, and it's only a matter of time before it's cheap enough. The question is whether there'll be any demand for it.
"There is a new beta of the Flash Player Update available. That's right: the beta is even available for Linux (same time as Windows and Mac).
This beta is affectionately named Moviestar due to these key new features:
* H.264 video
* AAC audio
* Hardware-accelerated fullscreen video playback (new for Linux in this beta; Win/Mac had it in previous beta)
Yep-- fullscreen hardware acceleration during video playback using OpenGL/GLX on Linux, where available... and functional. If you find that it does not work right, you can disable hardware acceleration using the "Settings..." menu from the right-click context menu. Oh, and file a bug with hardware details, video card driver version, GLX version, that sort of stuff.
If you have any questions about the new audio/video stuff, check Tinic's thorough blog post on the matter.
I would also like to hear if anyone is still experiencing the click bug (where no events are triggered in response to mouse clicks)."
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html
Now, how well it actually works is another matter...
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
Highly doubt all you want, but AppleTVs already pull raw h264 streams. So do iPhones.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
But not HD. Most likely the bit rate is limited to 10Mbit/s and resolution (on disk) to 720x576.
For HD it should be able to handle at least 20Mbit/s and 1280x720 resolution.
I think the requirements are a bit low, if you compare them to http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_ 2007/page21.html.
But then, the content is somewhat different.
Hence the reason I said mostly lossy.
Oops, I meant mostly lossless.
Flash supports Timed Text subtitles. SRT support is easy to implement, some players have it (wijering). As for other containers (mkv, avi) - if the codecs are supported you can just remux them to mp4. Frankly I don't see much of a reason for mkv anymore, now that we have mp4. Not to speak of that horrible ogm.
There is no such thing as an XViD container. And when people say DiVX they mean the video codec. Virtually nobody uses the so-called DiVX container, let alone their proprietary bitmapped subtitle format that doubles file sizes and isn't compatible with anything. Ripped movies use the XViD/DiVX codecs (and increasingly x264) but almost always inside avi or mkv containers. Oh, and H264 isn't a container either.