"What just happened to video on the web?" 11

Posted by andy

Adobe last night announced their flash player will support H.264 as of version 9 Update 3 Beta 2. This is amazing! Die WindowsMedia, die!! The best part is that the complete chain to produce high quality H.264 output can be build eniterely out of free open source based software! Now we only need an open source streaming server which sucks less than DSS. Read the very informative (and long) post by Tinic Uro. Incidentally I remember Tinic from the BeOS days where he wrote the rocking DualPlayer. Some of his scope code is still used inside AlsaPlayer.
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  1. Siem – August 21, 2007 @ 05:47 PM
    Howdy, I was almost crying this morning when I read the news ;-) this should give us some ammo to enjoy online video! Cheerio
  2. andy – August 21, 2007 @ 06:03 PM
    Amazing huh? Came out of nowhere for me :)

    -andy
  3. Rik Hemsley – August 21, 2007 @ 06:27 PM
    So, does this mean that I'll soon be able to watch videos on YouTube without my eyes bleeding?
  4. andy – August 21, 2007 @ 06:39 PM
    @Rik: H.264 can potentially produce better quality video, but in most cases the problem is the crappy source material which has probably been passed through 3 or 4 transcoding mills before it hit your retinas.

    -andy
  5. p3t0r – August 21, 2007 @ 07:13 PM
    Yeah, great stuff...! To bad there is no support for live streaming yet...
  6. Siem – August 22, 2007 @ 12:31 PM
    @andy, well, to be true, we had anticipated this, since its the only way to go. There was huge pressure from Google I guess, but still too bad they wont support open streaming standards (yet -)
  7. andy – August 22, 2007 @ 11:59 PM
    @Siem: after thinking a bit about it, I think the iPhone might have had a lot to do with it. Adobe clearly wants to stay relevant in the potential massive market of mobile video and H.264 is probably the only game in town there. Efficiency is key and FLV really sucks raw eggs when it comes to decoding performance IMO!

    -andy
  8. jiri – August 23, 2007 @ 10:27 AM
    "Now we only need an open source streaming server which sucks less than DSS." How about Red5?
  9. andy – August 23, 2007 @ 10:49 AM
    @jiri: after posting the article I found out that Adobe will actually not allow any third party streaming server to provide H.264 content to Flashplayer, only their own server. So if Red5 can work around this restriction.. sure! :)

    -andy
  10. Julik – August 24, 2007 @ 08:32 PM
    So the workflow now will be to hijack the actual video URL and enter it into quicktime player by hand instead. Good. Much better than to hear the 9 fans of my G5 spinning all over the place when watching a cute badger in the forest on Youtube. Rays of hatred to On2. Tinic Uro is certainly a nice fella but his blog is all but excuses. All the time. How's that scroll wheel going in mac flash player,Tinic? :-)
  11. Siem – August 27, 2007 @ 01:11 PM
    Its just too bad Red5 is no alternative concerning streaming, it simply dies when you have 15> concurrent connections.
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