8 Responses to “Codec Choice - H.264 and ACC added to Flash Player "MovieStar"”

1. #  Aran Rhee August 21, 2007 6:22 PM

   Hi Ted,
   
   One question now that I've had an intial play.
   
   Do you know of any tools to change the position of the "moov atom" as mentioned in Tinic's blog post:
   
   "If you use progressive download instead of FMS make sure that the moov atom (which is the index information in MPEG-4 files) is at the beginning of the file. Otherwise you have to wait until the file is completely downloaded before it is played back."
   
   Premiere / After Effects don't do this, and neither do most industry tools.
   
   I am looking for any windows commandline tool etc.
   
   I think this has the potential to be another killer problem such as the missing / corrupt metadata in FLV files !
   
   Cheers,
   Aran  

2. #  Mitch August 21, 2007 7:13 PM

   Hey Ted,
   
   Do you know if there is a debug version of the player available?  

3. #  greg h August 22, 2007 12:01 AM

   Hi Ted,
   
   You wrote "we are providing 2 video codecs" "With this release" "H.264 and ON2 VP6 'Simple Profile'"
   
   Can you point to other sources on the "ON2 VP6 'Simple Profile'" being added "With this release"?
   
   I am looking at a number of sources and yours alone references "ON2 VP6 'Simple Profile'"
   
   Some of the other sources I am looking at include:
   Press release:
   http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200708/082107FlashPlayer.html
   Release notes:
   http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/releasenotes.html
   Emmy's blog:
   http://weblogs.macromedia.com/emmy/archives/2007/08/big_day_for_web.cfm
   Tinic's blog:
   http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html
   
   Thanks,
   
   g  

4. #  Renaun August 22, 2007 4:10 AM

   @aran
   For progressive download index issue check out the AIR application, QT Index Swapper. It does the swapping of index bytes of the video files to allow proper Progressive Downloading. Give it a try and provide feedback,
   
   http://renaun.com/blog/2007/08/22/234/  

5. #  Ted Patrick August 22, 2007 4:53 AM

   "Simple Profile" is basically an uncompressed version of ON2 VP6 which eliminates the decompression phase for higher quality rendering but the bandwidth profile is much larger. This format is easily the most performant codec in terms of rendering but has a larger bandwidth requirement. If you were leveraging AIR and loading video from local disk, using ON2 VP6 Simple would provide the best quality and system performance given bandwidth is not a factor. I view it as a codec addition since it was not supported before while some view it as an extension to the existing VP6 codec already supported. Tinic highlighted this codec in a prior announcment regarding 720p and 1080p support in "MovieStar".
   
   See: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/videos/2007/06/14/tinic-uro-shows-new-fullscreen-hd-video-in-flash-player/
   
   The codec shown and being discussed here is VP6 "Simple Profile".
   
   Cheers,
   
   Ted  

6. #  Zokdok August 23, 2007 1:21 AM

   Too bad ExternalInterface is broken in this version.. makes it hardly usable for me and maybe some other sites will be broken too.
   
   (Reported in Safari / Firefox on MacOS X 10.4.10)
   
   Or it might just be me (hope so)...  

7. #  jmirkin October 17, 2007 2:04 PM

   Ted,
   Will/Does Flex also support H.264 playback (in components like the VideoDisplay Object)? As far as I can tell the file format is not interchangeable with FLVs.
   
   -Joel  

8. #  Ted Patrick October 22, 2007 7:30 AM

   Joel,
   
   FLV and MOV are seamless as urls. H264 is wrapped in an FLV wrapper. Also MOV with ACC audio and H264 video are supported. The new beta "MovieStar" player is avilable in the Flex 3 beta. The player should be released soon like in the next 3 weeks.
   
   Ted :)