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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
You just need nspluginwrapper.
It's a 64 bit plugin, that spawns a 32 bit shell running the Flash plugin.
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.
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?
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
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.
I didn't say DHTML could do everything Flash did. I said "Little of what Flash is used for even requires Flash...". Read my comment again.
Most sites using Flash are using it for such mundane purposes as doing mouseover/expanding menus and other simple interface mechanics that not only can be done with DHTML, but can be done simpler with broader browser compatibility and faster page-load times (less bytes on the wire). In fact, a site's basic interface and navigation should never require a plugin. Plugins should only offer added content.