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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?
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.
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
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.