It's a big day for online video because H.264 playback within the Flash player has finally arrived. Today, Adobe released the much anticipated update to it's streaming media line of products with the new Flash Player 9 Update 3, which now supports the H.264 and VP6-S codecs, both capable of efficiently streaming high definition content via the new Flash Media Server 3 (FMS). They also dramatically slashed the price of the FMS 3 to $995 for unlimited connections paving the way for High Definition H.264 streaming.Why is this important?
In short, one word - convergence.
H.264, or AVC (Advanced Video Coding), is the scalable video compression component of MPEG 4 (Part 10) and the core of HD media like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. This is the first public version of Flash Player 9 to include support for H.264 HD video playback, which means we could be seeing HD video at 1080P on YouTube and everywhere else in the near future. Along with the H.264 video support, Flash Player 9 also supports High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio encoding, the same audio encoding format used by iTunes.
In the clip below courtesy of Beet.TV, Bill Joll, CEO of ON2 Technologies helps put HD playback within Adobe Flash Player into perspective. On2S Supports H.264 as HD Flash Comes into Focus.
Related Links
Tim Siglin - Flash Media Server Spawns a Family
Ryan Stewart's Blog - Flash H.264 support and new pricing/availability for Flash Media Server 3Adobe Flash Player 9 is immediately available as a free download for Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms from www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer. To learn more about Adobe Flash Player 9, please visit www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/.
No comments:
Post a Comment