Filed under: Software, Internet Tools
Adobe adds H.264 support to Flash Player 9 beta
This video on the web thing is going to be big I tells ya! Read/Write Web is reporting that Adobe will be releasing an updated version of their Flash Player 9 beta tomorrow which has some new features aimed squarely at video on the web. The two biggies are:- H.264 playback support. You might recall that Apple is a big proponent of H.264, which every video sold in the iTunes Store encoded in it, and working with YouTube to encode their videos in H.264 for playback on the Apple TV.
- Hardware accelerated fullscreen playback.
Update: The new beta is now available, and it is a Universal Binary.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Raffi said 12:40AM on 8-21-2007
I just want them to make flash not make my Macbook fans roar at full speeds every time some flash content is loaded in my browser. It's kind of annoying. Make it more efficient.
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Sam said 12:40AM on 8-21-2007
could that mean iphone update with flash??
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Leonard Nimrod said 1:00AM on 8-21-2007
@ Sam,
No. There is no evidence that Flash 9 is ready for ARM CPUs.
It would be nice to see Adobe work on incorporating hardware acceleration into Flash That could seriously speed things up while saving power and using less system resources.
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arthur said 1:15AM on 8-21-2007
I just want flash to STOP PREVENTING AUTOMATIC SLEEP when any youtube/metacafe/etc video is open in any browser window.
Try it. play a youtube video and see if you mac goes to sleep after the proper timeout. Mine sure doesnt and its ANNOYING AS HELL
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Adam Searle said 3:06AM on 8-21-2007
This is going to be huge. As a flash developer, this only solidifies how important learning to deal with video online. Previously all video jobs I did always had a flash option and sometimes had a quicktime option. Now there will be no call for a quicktime version - finally with a high quality codec (lets face it, on2 is fast and light but not so sexy with quality), flash has it sorted.
In the last point release update, they added multicore support and mipmapping to improve bitmap image scaling. With silverlight looming as a distant threat, hopefully adobe will remain on their toes with improving flash!
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Adam Searle said 3:07AM on 8-21-2007
test
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Mo said 3:18AM on 8-21-2007
As a web developer, the implications of widespread (Flash penetration beats QuickTime's by a mile and a half) H.264 support are big… and good.
I've been waiting for this for a long time.
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Michael Williams said 3:43AM on 8-21-2007
This release will be Universal Binary. We have no plans to drop PowerPC support anytime soon.
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asdf said 4:09AM on 8-21-2007
@4
It's for good reasons that your system can go to sleep or screensaver mode, especially if its passworded.
If playing flash prevents someone from doing that, someone could be loading a website with a small flash animation that they don't know it, and when they go AFK with that open, someone else could go by and mess around with the computer.
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Targos said 4:59AM on 8-21-2007
flash is a pain in the a$$. Worst thing about the web
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arthur said 5:30AM on 8-21-2007
@ 9 I said Flash PREVENTS automatic sleep. STOPS THE COMPUTER FROM SLEEPING. I want the computer to go to sleep even if a flash movie is playing but it WILL NOT.
I cannot believe I am the only person in the world who has this problem. I have asked every major mac board on the net and i get no replies.
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Mike said 5:44AM on 8-21-2007
Bad move on Adobe's part, Flash video (YouTube) was their big lock in.
Flash will now only be used as an extremely ineffective way of creating navigation and framing around the video's, only to replaced easily by DHTML & Ajax technologies. Prediction: Youtube will ditch Flash within the year from now.
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Ben King said 7:40AM on 8-21-2007
Why would YouTube ditch Flash?! Its penetration numbers are the best there is. I don't see why adding H.264 means YouTube will DITCH it. Besides, YouTube's library is being converted to H.264. This is good! It means YouTube can switch to Flash + H.264 and thus higher quality videos with the same Flash market penetration.
Also, re: not-going-to-sleep guy: if you're watching a video WHY would you want your screen to turn off? Doesn't that mean that you can't watch the video?
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Justin said 7:54AM on 8-21-2007
@1
Well, I'm using the latest flash 9 beta on Firefox 3 alpha7 (Gran Paradiso) and it is using Quartz to do its thing. The fans don't roar and flash doesn't drag my system down. Of course since it is a FF3alpha there are issues on that end. The good news is that once everything is caught up, flash should stop sucking up so much juice.
Here's the blog entry on the Quartz thing:
http://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/flash-9-with-quartz-rendering-support/
And no, I don't know how this affects Safari.
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Steve said 8:04AM on 8-21-2007
As for codecs, H.264 and AAC are cool.
But what about the container format, will this still be FLV? I'd prefer true MPEG-4 container support, so any quicktime based encoder can encode video files for Flash.
And what about distribution? I'd love to see the Flash client gain RTSP support as addition to RTMP, so we can use other media servers instead the extremely expensive Flash Media Server. Darwin / QuickTime Streaming Server for instance.
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portorikan said 9:01AM on 8-21-2007
Well, the Adobe guy said it'll still be around for PowerPC chips.
Next time you should write more questions in the post and see if they answer.
:)
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Steve said 9:36AM on 8-21-2007
I read here (http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html) that MPEG-4 streaming from 3rd party servers will not be allowed?
I'm sorry? MPEG-4 is an open standard, aimed exactly to solve the issue of interoperability between different products: the whole idea of MPEG-4 is that we can choose any product from any vendor and use it in combination with any other product from any other vendor, as long as both comply to the standards.
So Adobe is tricking it's customers again... locking a standard in it's own technologies... claiming MPEG-4 support but using a proprietary (RTMP) streaming technology instead of the real deal (RTSP), and scaring off customers with remarks like '3rd parties need licensing from us'. There's nothing to license, stupid! MPEG-4 is not your technology to license. It's owned by 90% of the electronic consumer devices manufacturers.
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Charles Sporn said 1:11PM on 8-21-2007
Where can I download this latest version of flash?
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SpinThis! said 3:03PM on 8-21-2007
Interesting... Adobe appears to be eating some of Apple's lunch now. This is certainly not a push from Apple. Think about this... If you're a web developer, why would you even consider QuickTime now as a container when you can just put H.264 video in a Flash. Getting people to upgrade to the newest Flash is a lot easier than getting people to install QuickTime on their machines. That leaves little incentive for developers to even QuickTime if they can get the same high-quality video in Flash.
Holding my breath to see how it performs on Mac though...
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SpinThis! said 2:58PM on 8-21-2007
Steve (#17): You might want to the wikipedia's entry on h.264 regarding patent licensing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H264#Patent_licensing
In countries where software patent regulations are upheld, the vendors of products which make use of H.264/AVC are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology that their products use.
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