Flash and H.264: Together At Last
Mark Randall, chief strategist in the Dynamic Media organization at Adobe Systems, was obviously excited about the pre-announcement conference call to announce the inclusion of H.264 playback in a new version of the Flash player, code-named "Moviestar."
"I’m excited about this announcement," said Randall. "I’ve spent my career trying to continuously put better quality pixels on computer screens and this announcement could have more impact than all my previous work combined."
Adobe’s Flash 8 Video, powered by the On2 VP6 codec, is a very good codec, and Adobe has a license option on On2’s newer codec, VP7, which is arguably better than H.264 in that it provides equal quality with lower processing requirements. But, as Randall and others have pointed out, VP7 was announced during the production phase of the newest version of Flash CS3, so its day will have to wait until the next version of the content creation software.
H.264 support, on the other hand, has been built into Flash CS3, so it’s possible to encode content into H.264 as part of the standard Flash workflow. It’s not been of particular benefit to the Flash community, however, as no Flash Player was capable of playing back H.264 content (the current Flash Player 9 is, however, capable of playing back VP7 content created in other software tools and saved with the FLV extension). [Note: after publication, it was determined that the blog information - on which the VP7 comment was based - is erroneous and that no current Adobe product creates or plays VP7 content.]
H.264 is a standards-based codec that is used by Apple for many of its QuickTime-encoded movie trailers and special events, and the codec has seen growing adoption as part of both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the high-definition replacements for traditional DVD video playback. Adobe also intends to adopt H.264 as part of its upcoming Adobe Media Player, which is slated for release in the first quarter of 2008.
"H.264 is already a broadly adopted industry standard," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, in a press release. "Its inclusion in Adobe Flash Player, the Creative Suite product line, and the upcoming Adobe Media Player will accelerate customer workflows, enabling the creation and repurpose of high-quality web video content without extra development costs."
That ability to repurpose or reuse content is of interest to content creators whose video and audio content is slated to be used on high-definition DVDs and the web. Adobe has pledged to support H.264 profiles at both low- and high-bitrates, including profiles up to 1080p. And with the inclusion of hardware acceleration to offload some of the processing requirements from the client CPU to their graphics card, content creators won’t have to limit their web-delivered content to a quality significantly different from the user experience delivered by BluRay or HD-DVD on a larger screen."Our hardware acceleration testing has been very broad," said Randall. "We don’t want consumers to have to go out and purchase the latest, high-end $500 video card just to be able to accelerate playback, so we’ve been working on an extensive list of cards that will support hardware-accelerated Flash content playback, which includes scaling to the screen."
In addition to the H.264 video codec, the new Flash Player will also support AAC+ or AAC High Efficiency audio encoding. This codec, allowing for high-complexity and better high-frequency response, has been around for several years but has not seen widespread adoption, in large part due to the fact that iTunes and the iPod are geared toward the traditional AAC low-complexity codec in order to maintain compatibility across all iPods, including first-generation devices unable to decode AAC+ for proper playback.
A beta of the upcoming Flash Player will be available for download today at labs.adobe.com, while demonstrations of Adobe Flash Media Encoder supporting the new codecs will be shown at IBC 2007 in Amsterdam, September 7- 11 (Stand 7.721) and at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago in late September.