Adobe adds H.264 support to Flash Player 9 beta

@SpinThis!
I am aware of the MPEG licensing model, but this is Adobe icing MPEG-4 with a proprietary RTMP transport protocol instead of the official RTSP protocol, effectively locking in content owners and blocking out competitors. The very idea behind MPEG-4 is interoperability, so this really s*cks!

A nice updated flash that doesn't peg the procs on a mac will be nice. Even nicer after my day today would be a universal version of the shockwave plugin. I've got schools that use several sites that use shockwave. I've got safari running in rosetta mode just for this. Highly annoying this far into the intel game that shockwave is still ppc.
P

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.

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...

Where can I download this latest version of flash?

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.

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.

:)

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.

@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.

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?