Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Flash Player 9 Gets H.264 Support

Posted by kdawson on 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.

3 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Not bloated enough!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Any chance you Flash guys can add in a Java machine, some new 3D algorithms, and a salami slicer?

  2. Re:What about theora (and dirac)? by Goaway · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    h.264 is a far better codec than Theora will ever be, and it's standardized instead of being a hobbyist toy project.

  3. Re:What about theora (and dirac)? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Define "define"! Define "and"! As though asking silly questions like that does anything to diminish the points he made.

    Nobody uses Theora. Nobody! If a format is not supported out of the box on Windows, it has no chance of ever becoming relevant. And Theora, like it or not, will never be supported out of the box on Windows.

    Flash adopting H.264 is significant because it makes H.264 supported out of the box on Windows, since Flash is installed on every Windows box. That means H.264 is now the video format for the web, game over. YouTube has already adopted H.264 for its third-party contracts like the iPhone. Now that Flash is adding support for H.264, the web version of YouTube will soon follow. And H.264 is already required for bot HD-DVD and BluRay, so it will win no matter which HD format wins the war.

    DivX and Xvid in hacked up AVI wrappers may hang on for a little while longer when it comes to non-legit undeground Torrented content, but as far as legit content is concerned, that's it. H.264 is the future.

    And I wouldn't concern myself about royalties or patents. There are plenty of open source projects that support H.264, and so far none of them have gotten hassled. It's doubtful they ever will, because there is no money involved. Besides, Theora offers no protection from that sort of thing, because it is probably stepping on someone's patents somewhere. If a company wanted to go after open source video, Theora vs. H.264 wouldn't make any difference. They would find something to sue over either way. So Theora offers no practical real-world advantage in that area.