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.

Comments

T minus...

[MrNemesis]

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!

Re:Ads

[WPIDalamar]

People bitching about Flash because of ads is like people bitching about C because of viruses.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[JeremyBanks]

I figured that as well, but even if they take advantage of that, they'll need to check what version the user has and serve content accordingly, because obviously this update won't be everywhere at once.

Re:What other media players already support H.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264.

Converting to H.264 might result in smaller files

What?

Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[KlomDark]

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?

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say most of your points are valid, but... quad-universal binaries? You're obviously not familiar with OS X, but as you say you're mainly a Linux person, that's forgivable. :-)

Intel Macs won't have a 64-bit operating system until Leopard comes out in a month or so. So everything on an Intel Mac is running in 32-bit, regardless of whether you're using a Core or Core 2. Incidentally, the Core 2 is also a faster processor than the original Core, at equivalent clock speeds. It's also well-known that Core 2 64-bit performance is inferior to AMD's offerings (though the 32-bit performance is every bit as superior as reported), which probably implies 64-bitness in Leopard probably won't improve performance much.

And, in any case, OS X has never come with 64-bit GUIs, even back in the G5 days. A 64-bit Cocoa API is also new with Leopard.

So no, "quad-universal binaries" don't exist (and would be a QA nightmare anyway). It's just that 32-bit apps run just fine on x86-64. x86-64 was basically designed for that exact purpose.

I'm just glad AMD started the 64-bit transition when they did, as we're finally beginning to run up against the limitations of 32-bit addressing. Who knows where we'd be if we were still stuck with IA64, or Intel's assertion that 32-bit CPUs were still good enough. A desktop application needing 4+ GB of memory (games in particular, but also a lot of content creation applications, which are also becoming more popular as more people have faster computers) isn't quite as ridiculous as it used to be.

And this, incidentally, is the real reason why 64-bit computing is going to become important. Not because most applications need it (they don't--this has even been true on the server side for quite some time; face it, cat doesn't need 64-bit address spaces, even for LFS), but because when you need it, you really need it. The 64-bit desktop has become stable enough that I'm comfortable running it right now, even if most of my apps are still 32-bit. Because reinstalling an OS isn't something you should have to do more than once every five years.

And for developers (like myself), a 64-bit desktop is a godsend.

Re:Yes, but does it get x64 support?

[mabinogi]

Have a look at This article.
With 4GB machines being more and more common (my laptop has 4GB - and it's not a workstation class one either, just a medium high end consumer one), the need for a 64 bit addressing is no longer something in the distant future.
32 bit addressing - and particularly the 2G userland / kernel split in Windows is already causing problems for games right now.

Sun and Adobe are both dragging the chain on 64 bit browser plugins. Although, at least Adobe say they're working on it, but Sun's reluctance makes little to no sense, they've had a 64 bit JVM and JDK for years, for both Windows and Linux. If they can manage to port the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of lines of code in the JVM to AMD64, why can't they manage the plugin? Surely that's only a handful of lines? A couple of thousand at most?

Re:Who cares?

[jellomizer]

I really don't see why this pure hatred of flash. With sure the official versions are not open source. But all in all it is better then what we had before. If you don't remember back in the days of IE 4 and Netscape 4 Every website that wanted to do something a little more advanced then showing a couple of animated gifs, usually had or made their own plug in that worked only for Windows, or sometimes in a rare occurrence there was a plug in that would work on different OS's. Now with flash this isn't the case anymore if you have 1 plugin Flash then you are good to go. It is fast to load and to play even on slow systems. Adobe is rather good about making it available to multiple platforms Windows, Mac, Linux, those are the main OS's which you would expect people to be viewing these type of pages. The player is Free as in Beer (Development tools cost a lot though... But for you flash haters it is a good thing becaue that makes sure that flash use is more limited to people who are professional or aspire to be professional, not just some kid who wants to make an ugly flash to 1337 their friends).

Is it just because because it is Not Open Source?
Is it that you are annoyed because it doesn't work on your obscure OS / hardware, or server hardware which you probably needed to hack just to get a display on it?
Is it just because your a purist for sake of being a purist not caring about the benefit, only focusing on the flash adds?
Or are you just jelious that you didn't make it yourself. And you spent so much time learning how to program Java Applets that you feel ripped off.

Re:Who cares?

[Paradox]

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.

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?

Re:You can use Flash on AMD64 Firefox

[Nimey]

$ file firefox-bin

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.

Re:Is this for YouTube?

[sremick]

"how long will it take for most people to upgrade flash versions?"

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:Who cares?

[apoc.famine]

That wasn't his point - I too use FlashBlock. The problem is that there is no way to know what's there until you start it. At which point, you often can't easily stop the flash if it turns out to be an ad, or something else you didn't want. There often is no way to pause it to go grab a drink. There often is no way to rewind it and start over.

It's easy to "choose what flash items you want turned on individually" - it's damn near impossible most of the time to actually have any control over the flash item once started.

I hate flash with a passion because of this reason. If they put a useful, standard video menu in it which you could bring up via a right- click, I'd hate it far less. In fact, at that point it would be semi-useful. As-is, it's another example of "this is how you will see it, take it or leave it". Most of us want at least some semblance of control over the media presented to us. I prefer my eyelids not pried opened and stapled to my head.

Re:Will it have a STOP button?

[^_^x]

Yes - I wish it would fade into obscurity. I have to admit I keep a copy though, because without it, thousands (millions?) of websites basically just say "Sorry, you don't have Flash installed. Nothing here for you!"

Will they release the SDK in a timely manner?

[J-1000]

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.

Don't forget about container formats

[tknd]

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.