Flash Player 9 Update "MovieStar" Adds Support for H.264 Video and HE-AAC Audio CODECs!
According to an official press release from Adobe, blog entries from RIA Platform Evangelist Ryan Stewart, Flash Player Engineer Tinic Uro, Flash Player Product Manager Emmy Huang, blogger Richard McManus and others, later today Adobe will be posting an updated beta of Flash Player 9 on http://labs.adobe.com that adds support for several of the profiles of industry standard H.264 video and HE-AAC audio CODECs along with some other great enhancements! The final version is scheduled to ship later this fall. The new formats are also going to be supported in an upcoming release of Flash Media Server. Truly awesome news for Flash Platform developers, media developers, and producers. The options for video formats in Flash just exploded with a huge bang. Very good news for a variety of projects that revolve or rely on the Flash Platform.Not only are the new CODECs and containers supported, but they build on the already announced hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full screen video playback that was introduced in the previous Flash 9 beta 3 on labs.adobe.com. Now you'll be able to view any H.264 encoded video including MP4 and MOV in full screen with hardware acceleration right in Flash.
One key item to note, is that you if you have a project that still needs to target ActionScript 2.0, you can still use these new features in your projects as the API's haven't changed, just the type of contents that are supported. As long as the visitor to your site or consumer of your content has the updated Flash 9 player installed (which you can very easily determine and upgrade for them via the Express Install API in Flash) then you are going to be able to deliver a great experience. I'm assuming that looking at the properties of the System.capabilities object might also return additional info about H.264, etc. similar to the way it returns info about MP3 capabilities. you could potentially use that or simply evaluate the player version, and you'll be able to intelligently determine what formats the player currently consuming your content is capable of loading and displaying.
As always, Tinic Uro has a ton of great details and insight into the nitty-gritty of the new enhancements and features, including the exact profiles of H.264 that are supported, and other pertinent details. As is typical of his posts, not only does he delve into the new features, and why/how certain decisions were made on the new fetures, but also some side effects of implementation. In particular one item he makes note of is that when implementing portions of the AAC audio codec, they needed to resample everything up to 44.1khz, so he was also able to fix the long-standning issue with certain sampling rates of mp3's resulting in accelerated playback or the "chipmunk effect". As he mentions, this has been around for years and is finally fixed - thank you Tinic! I first ran into this years ago when pulling in dynamically generated mp3's - I'm glad thats finally fixed! There is far more info in Tinics post about the profiles and various items, metadata, etc. that make up the enhancements that have been announced.
I'm super excited about this release as I've been working on a number of video and Flash Media Server projects recently and each of them will potentially benefit from this new release and path that Adobe has put the Flash Player on.
I'm definitely placing an order for an Elgato turbo.264 H.264 Video Encoder Accelerator right now!
I'll update this entry with more info once the official bits are posted at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9 later today. (more)
- 08.21.2007 06:30am - 
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