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VP8 Decoder Implemented In Flash Using Alchemy
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla's Chris Double has an interesting post on his blog about a port of the VP8 decoder to Flash. He writes, 'Ralph Hauwert has been posting on twitter about work he's done on getting WebM decoding to work by compiling the libvpx source code using Adobe's Alchemy technology. Alchemy is a research project that allows compilation of C and C++ libraries into code that runs on the ActionScript virtual machine used by Flash.' Of course, it's very slow and Adobe says that they'll bring native VP8 support to Flash in due course, but implementing a VP8 decoder in ActionScript is an interesting project nonetheless."
Now that Google has dropped h.264 support from Chrome, the new reality is that the <video> tag in HTML5 is dead, and pretty much all desktop video will be served in Flash players.
So it's good they are getting a head start on getting the VP8 codec tuned in Flash, although the practical reality is that for full support in all browsers all you'll have to do is encode in h.264 and call it a day; thus that's all most companies will ever do. You have to encode in h.264 to support video playback on iOS devices which is still a huge segment of the mobile market that uses the internet.
After all Adobe owns Flash, and they have no reason to remove h.264 support now that web designers are being forced to use of Flash players for desktop. So the new steady state for the system is h.264 in Flash players everywhere except for systems that can play h.264 directly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who cares Google did away with H.264. They can go to hell........Stop using Chrome and Android OS people!!
They won't support H.264 because its proprietary but they went out of there way to support Flash. Only reason they did that was so they had a selling point against iOS.
by russryan
Also, http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 for a VP8 tear down.
"Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise. The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264."
Ouch. You're a brave man to publish that on /.
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