Flash to include H.264 video codec
Michael Gay August 21st, 2007
In an announcement today, Adobe says it will make the H.264 video codec part of the widely used Flash player. What does this mean? The same high-quality video compression used on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD videos will now be available on the Web, with full-screen playback features. While Flash video has been good enough for 4×3 news content on the Web, you haven’t seen too much high quality 16×9 video in Flash. QuickTime had offered higher quality, and started supporting H.264 with QuickTime 7. Today’s move from Flash is a huge leap forward for HD quality video streaming, and more evidence that HD video distribution will not be unique to broadcasters. More on this announcement from NewTeeVee. If you want to get technical, check out this post.
3 Comments Add your own
1. ~bc | August 21st, 2007 at 11:12 am
This could be amazing, if done well. But that’s a big “if.” Adobe has a mixed track record: for example, some simple Flash files run much faster on an old PC than on a new Mac (with the same Intel architecture, just much more horsepower). Hopefully, Adobe will be addressing that, too.
2. Dave | August 21st, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Looks like a response to the impending debut of Silverlight and its HD video capabilities.
3. Will | August 21st, 2007 at 6:47 pm
What Flash needs is a codec that has both good quality and reasonable demands on system resources. Right now it has neither, and H.264 won’t address the latter.
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