Flash Player gets H.264 support

Published September 21st, 2007 in: Web Media Player, Flash Video

Flash Player gets H.264 support

Finally(!), and probably thanks to YouTube's latest attempt to play along with Apple TV, Adobe has decided to implement support for H.264 video compression in the Flash Player. This means publishers can now distribute video using the more widely adopted MPEG-4 compression line (.mp4, .m4a, .m4p, .mp4v, .m4v, .3gp, .3g2) for streaming, instead of FLV only.

Application developers will also have a field day with this, since they now can tap into the entire Media Player market for real. The only drawback I can see this far, is the decision to lock streaming capabilities to the Flash Media Server only. So if you are a publisher you'll need the FMS to do real streaming to the Flash Player. But on the other side, many publishers only use progressive streaming (where users can play while downloading), so it may not be so much of a problem in most scenarios.

As reported before, I'm currently developing the Web Media Player which will benefit greatly from the H.264 support. No longer will it be a FLV-player only. It's going to be a complete Media Player. In addition to MPEG-4 compression, the upcoming Flash Player will also be able to use HW-acceleration for full screen viewing, which is great news. I'll be releasing the WMP alpha soon, and have recently been testing the full screen capabilities extensively.

You will need to download and install the latest Flash Player 9 beta to benefit from the HW-acceleration capabilities. Follow the instructions and uninstall your old Flash Player first.

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