The video in question was over 8 hours in length, 8 hours 26 minutes and 26 seconds to be exact. It was encoded using the On2 VP6 CODEC and clocked in at 1.4GB in size. Not the typical average length and size for an FLV by any means, but I thought it certainly should be supported as it plays fine when streamed, or progressively downloaded, but the duration value was wrong. The other metadata values were correct, just duration.

Unfortunately this file was to be hosted on bitgravity’s network using their advanced-progressive delivery - a customized high performance, scalable version of the pseudo-streaming technique made popular by Stefan Richter and others as described here. So this compounded the problem as the bitgravity player requires the duration to be correct in order to calculate the proper position of the scrub/seek bar and to keep track of the offset of the beginning of the video when jumping/seeking which causes new requests for the video to be sent out, where a server side process looks at the video and its embedded keyframe metadata as well as the duration, recalculates the proper header, and begins sending data from the approximate requested keyframe position onward. So having an incorrect duration really fouled up playback in this specific instance of the bitgravity player.

Each tool I tried using to inject/view the metadata, including: flvtool2, flvtool++ and jflvtool all inserted incorrect values - and the results varied from tool to tool. I was going to try Burak Kalaycis FLVMDI metadata injector tool, but as luck would have it, Burak is also on Stefans mailing list, and he chimed in and mentioned that FLVMDI has some other limitations on the file size of videos that it can process (currently limited to 700MB), and that I would probably hit that issue first. So I didn’t run it through FLVMDI - but Burak did also confirm that his tool also suffers from the same problem, where the duration value would be incorrect, and if he gets a chance to fix it, he would update us on that.

The key issue does indeed relate to the length or duration of the .FLV itself and the FLV container format and specs for how the duration metadata value is stored. For videos that are under approximately 4.5 hours, everything is fine. However, once a video exceeds a little over 4 hours and 39 minutes, this is when the duration values appear incorrect with these tools, and all of them report back a value of around 16777.990 seconds in duration, a little more than half of the 8 hours 26 minutes of the video I was working with, which should have reported 30386 seconds.

I assumed that the problem might have something to do with the extra long duration, so thats when I began doing some research on the maximum length of FLV’s. I determined thanks to some help from Asa Whillock that the problem lies in how the duration value is stored in the .FLV container and the publicly available specs that were available at the time to third party authors that developed these applications. Originally the spec (prior to FMS 1.0) only designated a 3 byte integer type (UI24) to store the duration in milliseconds, or just enough to store a value corresponding to (256*256*256) 16.7 million or 16,777,990 milliseconds or 16777.990 seconds or 4 hours, 39 minutes, 37 seconds. So any video with a duration greater than that that can’t be represented with the single 3 byte sequence as the original FLV spec listed. Asa pointed out that in the recent spec they added an extended 7 byte UI8 tag named “TimeStampExtended”. This tag is to immediately follow the original 3 byte UI24 “TimeStamp” tag, and then both values are used to store the time. In this arrangement the original “TimeStamp” tag acts as the lower 24bits of the duration in milliseconds, and the “TimeStampExtended” acts as the upper 8 bits of the duration in milliseconds. This results in a 4 byte representation when combined, (256*256*256*256) so a maximum of 4.2 billion or 4,294,967,296 milliseconds or 4294967.296 seconds or 1193 hours, 2 minutes and 47 seconds or nearly 50 days straight worth of video. This would certainly allow just about any videos duration to be stored properly in the metadata.

So it looks like the solution to the the problem is to make sure the duration is stored using not only the “TimeStamp” tag but also the “TimeStampExtended” tag in order to store the full value of the duration for any video that exceeds 4 hours, 39 minutes and 37 seconds, otherwise the duration will be truncated to only the first 3 byte representation. To me this looks like a fairly easy fix (although the devil is always in the details). Burak is already aware of the issue, and I have gone ahead and emailed the info to Chris Norman of Facebook who wrote the c++ flvtool++ implementation, as well as Norman Timmler over in Germany who wrote the flvtool2 in Ruby. I still need to write the author of the java based jflvtool. Fernando Florez of Funciton Communications mentioned a colleague of his has a Python based metadata injector that also suffers from this issue, but they are working on a patch and will try to release that as open source at some point. So I have hope we will have a third party tool capable of handling videos of this length in the short term.

If it helps anyone else working on similar tools, the exact reference to the “TimeStampExtended” tag is on page 9 of Adobes Video File Format Specification Version 9

I haven’t yet had a chance to see if any commercial products like Sorenson Squeeze, On2 Flix, and the Flash CS3 Video Encoder correctly store the duration for videos over 4:39:37 in length - but will try to validate that and update this article once I’ve had a chance. I’m making an assumption the Adobe’s encoder does support it properly.

Thanks to Asa Whillock of Adobe for input and validation on this, as well as fellow Adobe Community Experts Fabio Sonnati and Stefan Richter and his invaluable FLASHMEDIA mailing list and to Burak Kalayci and Fernando Florez for their input and thoughts. Thanks guys!

UPDATE: 09/02/08 - I found another nice FLV metadata injector: YAMDI - http://yamdi.sourceforge.net/ but it also appears to suffer from the same bug.

Its been several days and I still have yet to hear back from Bitgravity about their FLVMDU tool that their CTO Barrett Lyon posted about in the comments. I emailed him directly right after the comment was posted, as well as through support as he noted and got a ticket #1678, but have yet to receive a response from Barrett or their support staff. Chalking it up to the holiday weekend.

UPDATE: 09/03/08 -I spent some extra time tonight trying to locate a copy of the Bitgravity FLVMDU tool and with a little careful url guessing, was successful and found this link to the tool - it also includes the source under a GNU license which is nice. This version is dated 06-18-2008 as version 1.0.0. Unfortunately after running it through the same series of tests on a video with a duration greater than 4 hours 39 minutes and 37 seconds, it also fails to write the proper duration on such a long video. So it appears that bitgravity needs to also update their utilities to support the “TimeStampExtended” tag. There was a note to contact a “pclarke” at bitgravity in regards to bugs - so I’ve dropped them a note and pointed them at this article. Hopefully they will be able to fix things as of right now every FLV metadata injector tool I’ve tested suffers the same problem.

UPDATE: 09/03/08 12:37AM - I found one more nice flv metadata injector and dumper called flvmeta available here http://code.google.com/p/flvmeta/. The source, and pre-made binaries for windows and Mac OS X are available, but it too appears to suffer from the bug I’ve been exploring since it doesn’t appear to support the “TimeStampExtended” tag either. Looks like everyone completely missed this in the spec, or just didn’t implement it for some reason.

UPDATE: 09/03/08 12:24PM - I heard back from Perry Clarke at Bitgravity in response to my email to him about the bug/lack of support for “TimeStampExtended” in their FLVMDU tool. Perry noted, “I haven’t reproduced the issue you report though I can believe it’s a problem. I’ll look into it when I have time.” So if you rely on FLVMDU when working with bitgravity, you’ll probably need to pester Perry or their support team to implement proper support in FLVMDU if your video is longer than 4 hours 39 minutes 37 seconds, especially if you are using their advanced progressive http delivery for videos - as that service requires the keyframe/metadata hinting and proper metadata duration tag otherwise it wont work properly. If they don’t update the tool, you’ll need to deliver your video in smaller chunks (less than 4 hours 39 minutes 37 seconds). I’d recommend smaller chunks anyway given the memory usage.

UPDATE: 09/08/08 7:40PM - Last week I heard back from Dan Weatherford of Facebook and the primary author of flvtool++ He was very responsive in working with me to get in the proper support for the “TimeStampExtended” tag for proper durations on long videos. We made a number of test files from a variety of all the popular FLV exporters and transcoders and Dan was able to implement the full spec in the latest version of flvtool++ 1.1.2 available here: http://mirror.facebook.com/facebook/flvtool++/ The funny thing was that we found was that not a single tool, none of the flv metadata injectors out there, nor any of the FLV encoders we tested put in the proper duration in “TimeStampeExtended” format. Not ffmpeg, not Squeeze 5, not On2 Flix, not even Adobe Flash CS3 Video Encoder (standalone or Quicktime Exporter) and even a few upcoming apps currently in beta that I have access too - none of them inserted the proper duration in “TimeStampExtended” format for videos over 4 hours 39 minutes and 37 seconds. I thought this was especially odd for the Adobe apps - so it just looks like everyone totally overlooked this. Thanks so much to Dan Weatherford for his time in implementing proper support into flvtool++. Its currently the only tool I know of that properly supports “TimeStampExtended”

The past 2 years, I have been so busy with other aspects of my life and knee-to-head-deep in work related projects that I haven’t posted with any regular frequency. I have a great deal of things I would like to write about, but my priorities have been with my family, (primarily my 2 year old son Owen and my 3 month old daughter Delaney who are both wonderful), getting work done and participating more in my local community and user groups. I have also found that using micro-blogging and other Web 2.0 social services like Twitter, Pownce, and many others have really contributed to me not feeling the need to post as much to my blog.

I decided that if I was going to do any sort of writing or blogging at all, that I would want a much more robust system that met the following criteria:

• More efficient at day to day tasks and operations
• More robust plugin API and extensibility layer
• Additional CMS like features
• Better support for theming/skinning and CSS
• Better support for valid XHTML
• More robust and flexible administration controls

Back in early 2003, I adopted an early beta version of Pivot and have hacked it to death over the years to the point where upgrading would be more pain than its worth. I had considered moving to their new 2.0 version, but in the end, with the criteria and features I had in mind, the API, extensibility and community around Wordpress really impressed me more. I had already written some plugins and custom shortcodes for several clients of mine over the past year without getting too deep into the guts of Wordpress and was impressed from that perspective in that the documentation was clear and easy to follow. Then I got a chance to meet Matt Mullenweg in person a few months back at an event in Philadelphia, and he impressed me with his ideas. So I installed Wordpress and after only a few hours I was able to take the vast majority of hacks and modifications I had incorporated over the years to Pivot and convert them into true plug-ins for Wordpress.

The first three I made are Glossolalia, WP-List Filter and TwitterRSS. Glossolalia wraps my text-to-speech system for generating and cacheing MP3’s for consumption by Flash other players into a Wordpress plugin to automatically generate spoken word copies of each entry on demand. It was easy enough to tie in the delivery with another popular Wordpress plugin: Martin Laines 1-Pixel Out Audio Player this made things so simple. Wp-List Filter is a plugin that adds a filter to the wp_list_pages() function so you can alter the the way Wordpress outputs and tags the UL data for the top level menu of pages in your system. This allowed me to implement my own custom CSS variant of the “sliding door” style/technique for CSS based tabs for my main navigation. This technique was made popular by an article by Doug Bowman on a List Apart a few years back. I just added an extra span so that I never have to worry about the width, I have an image for each edge of the tab, and an image in the middle that is scaled as needed for the background, a little more CSS, but better results. This was pretty much impossible to do with the default wp_list_pages() function. If I get a chance to clean up the source a bit, I’ll probably release this for folks to tinker with. The final one TwitterRSS was to accomplish one of my goals to incorporate all the micro-blogging and Web 2.0 Social Services that I use into feeds I can display on my own site. You can see it in action here.

All of these items made the decision to move from Pivot to Wordpress very easy. Much of the functionality I had to hack into Pivot was already in Wordpress or just a search and install away from the huge library of community developed plugins. So I’ve been working on and off the past month or so to move all my old posts, and not just my blog but my entire site infrastructure and odds and ends that have accumulated over the years following me from server to server - nearly 5 gigs worth of cruft (not including email, client work and other domains I host). I have paired it all down and things are running lean and mean now. Everything has been moved to an entirely new server at MediaTemple.net - I have been using them for my hosting for over 6 years now and highly recommend them.

There are some really great plugins for Wordpress - two of my favorites are centered around the iPhone. The first one I want to mention: WPtouch iPhone Theme With this plugin installed if you visit my site with an iPhone (or Safari 3 and set the user agent to iPhone or iPod Touch) by default you will get an experience and theme that is optimized for the device. Its also smart enough to allow you to switch back and forth from the optimized version to the full CSS styled version.

The second plugin is: WPhone a lightweight admin interface for the iPhone and other mobile devices. This makes it super handy to administrate the site from remote. Although now there is a full blown iPhone native app that Wordpress released to handle this task and it works very well indeed. They were even nice enough to release the source code to the community which will only encourage continued development.

I still have quite a bit of content I want to flesh out around the site, particularly the Services, Portfolio and Community sections, but the bulk of the work and configuration is done and I’ll gradually flesh those three sections out over the next few days to weeks. I also spent several hours making sure I have 301 Redirects in place for all old links and popular content, and for items that might have had their locations and URL’s re-arranged or changed. However, if you notice any 404’s, errors or other missing content or JavaScript issues, please let me know by dropping me a note. Beyond that the two other big things I am working on. The first is to implement a cacheing plugin for Wordpress as its default architecture is to always dynamically build pages by way of queries to a MySQL database. One nice feature of Pivot, it that is was all flat XML and pre-rendered pages so it was always pretty fast to serve up, and there was never a possibility you might run out of database connections. As long as Apache and PHP could stay up, your site would stay up. I haven’t really load tested things with Wordpress and my current configuration but I’d like to do whatever I can to optimize the loading and prevent potential failure due to loads on MySQL. The second item is to consolidate a great deal of the JavaScript libraries that are leveraged in various parts of the site. There are several that are used and even though they are in packed format, it still eats up a ton of transfer. I also want to follow some optimization and best practice tips that team members at Yahoo have come up with such as moving scripts to the end of HTML content and other little items that should help on the load and execution time.

Finally this site is now geared at the most modern browsers capable of CSS and transparent PNG files. I’m not even bothering to put in hacks or support for anything but the most current browsers, like Safari 3, Firefox 3, and IE 7 and any Flash content will require the latest Flash 9 or possibly Flash 10 player. For a client I would offer a bit more backwards compatibility for sure, but I’m not as concerned about that for my own personal site. So if you are running Internet Explorer 5 for Mac or any browser that hasn’t been released in the past few months to a year and the site doesn’t look or operate properly for you. I encourage you to upgrade, not just for my site, but for all the other benefits of using the latest versions bring to you like security enhancements, additional features, bug fixes, etc. That being said, if you are using the latest and greatest and things are just not working for you as you would expect, please feel free to drop me a note.

I have put together a special page with a bunch of links to photos on my wife Melissa’s Flickr account, as well as a bunch of videos I uploaded to my Viddler account which can be found here:

http://delaney.impossibilities.com/

I am still a bit exhausted from the week and meant to get this up sooner but just havent had the energy or the time. I’ll put up some additional detail here soon as well.

Thanks to all my twitter friends and family who have written thanks and congratulations. If you haven’t heard back from me yet, I will get back to you as soon as I can.

I am taking off the next couple weeks from work and new projects to spend with my new daughter and the rest of my family, so I wont be able to respond to emails and other inquiries as fast as I normally do, so please allow a little extra time for replies.

Adobe’s RIA technologies enable you to rapidly build and deploy the most engaging applications across browsers and on the desktop. The local Philadelphia Adobe User Groups are hosting a special joint, live event to share exciting new information on Adobe’s platform tools and technologies for building RIAs. You’ll see an exclusive user group video presentation by Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive shwag and other giveaways.

Be part of the fun and excitement and join the rest of the Adobe developer community by participating in this very special event.

Food, beverages and cool prizes will be available for all attendees. We have got some great goodies for this event, and some awesome raffle prizes.

Super special thanks to Alex Hillman of Independents Hall for hooking us up with the meeting space at the last minute! Shout-outs to Alex’s partners at Indy Hall: Bart Mroz and Geoff DiMasi for their support and general coolness all around.

DATE: Monday, February 25
TIME: 7PM - whenever
LOCATION: Independents Hall




DIRECTIONS: 32 Strawberry Street, Philadelphia, PA

Park on the street if you’re lucky, otherwise there are several garages in the immediate area that you can easily use.

Make sure you arrive early for the Red Bull!

Here are some related links for the Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0 releases:

Official Adobe Press Release: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200802/022508AdobeAIR.html

ADOBE AIR 1.0 LINKS

Get AIR 1.0: http://www.adobe.com/go/air

AIR 1.0 Runtime Install Page: http://get.adobe.com/air/

AIR Tools - Free SDK, EXtensions, etc. : http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/

AIR product page: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

AIR - Getting Started: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/getstarted/

AIR for Flash Developers: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/flash/

AIR for Flex Developers: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/flex/

AIR for AJAX developers: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/ajax/

AIR FAQ: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/faq/

AIR Marketplace: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=24&loc=en_us

AIR Developer Center: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/

30 On AIR - great videos about “Why AIR/Flex/Flash”: http://www.30onair.com/

Aptana - Third Party IDE for AIR, JS, etc: http://www.aptana.com/air

ADOBE FLEX 3.0 LINKS

Get Flex 3.0: http://www.adobe.com/go/flex

FREE Flex 3.0 SDK: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/downloads/?sdid=ZFCT

Flex Builder Free for Students! More info here: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200710/102407adobeflexedu.html

Download Flex Builder 3 Professional 60 Day Trial: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flex3email

Mike Potters post about the launch: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/flexteam/archives/2008/02/its_on_-_flex_3.cfm

A brand new site from Adobe focused on Open Source: http://opensource.adobe.com/

Flex.org Community Site - All things Flex: http://flex.org/

RIA - Rich Internet Applications: ttp://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/?promoid=BTMAX#

So other than some community events related to local Philly events and our User Group meetings, and now this entry, I haven’t posted much at all since October of last year. I’ve just found myself utterly immersed in work, local community events and family time so the blog just hasn’t been a priority. I have been using twitter quite a bit - http://twitter.com/rhall/ if you want to follow me. I’m very excited to post about some of the projects I have been working on, and I’ll do so over the next few weeks as they all finish “baking”.

One project I can mention briefly that is still in somewhat stealth mode, but is now popping up everywhere is Redlasso - http://www.redlasso.com/ I’ll post more about it another time, just wanted to put up a link for now since its not open to the general public, but if you are interested in find out more, go to the site and sign up.

More to come soon…

 
A reminder that December 6th, this coming Thursday evening at 6pm at the North Bowl Lounge N’ Lanes The Philly Creative Guides Second Annual Mega Social will be taking place.

More info here:

http://www.phillycreativeguide.com/news/2007/11_november/event/index.htm

And if you use upcoming.org - the event detail is there as well:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/335308/

Join your compatriots in the Philly creative industry for an evening of socializing, networking and fun at Northern Liberties’ hot spot - North Bowl Lounge n’ Lanes. The cost? Once again, absolutely free with a donation to the Philadelphia Marine Corps Toys for Tots Campaign. In return you’ll enjoy complimentary food, drink specials, camaraderie and prizes. Last year was a blast, so don’t miss out on the Second Annual Creative Mega Social!

I wanted to point out that I am going to be there representing The Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group and Adobe, and will have over $5000 worth of goodies to be raffled away, including full boxed copies of the CS3 Web Suite, and Flex Build 2 with Charting Components, along with all the other raffle items the 7 other local Philadelphia based groups in attendance will be giving away.

So grab a toy or two to donate, come on out and put a smile on a childs face, all while having a great time and having a great chance at winning some cool prizes.

If you do plan on attending, please RSVP here:

http://www.phillycreativeguide.com/rsvp/

I am really looking forward to the keynotes, bird of a feather sessions and sneak peeks. There is going to be some amazing stuff shown and announced over the next few days. If you thought the barrage of applications and info from the CS3 suite of apps, AIR, Flex, etc. has been fast and furious, well its still not slowing down - we are going to see some pretty-frigging-cool stuff very soon. It also been really fun getting to see and catch up with friends and acquaintances I have made over the years that I often don’t get to see except at conferences - got to see Matt Voerman for the first time in almost 3 years! Looking forward to bumping into more folks and meeting new ones as well. I’m also eager to attend some of the partner sessions now that I am an official Adobe Solution Partner.

Also not to diminish the news or importance, but my wife and I are pleased to announce that we are expecting our second child! Owen our first child is 16 months old and he is amazing, and now he will have a little baby sister or brother in about 7 months this coming April. My wife Melissa and I are both very excited about having another child. I am not quite as nervous this time around having been through it once and I can’t wait to meet our new baby in April.

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.The following is an FAQ about the capabilities that Emmy Huang, Flash Player Product Manager put together about the new Flash 9 Player beta “MovieStar” release.

What is H.264?
H.264 is the next-generation video compression technology in the MPEG-4 standard, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 (ISO/IEC 14496-10). H.264 delivers excellent video quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum - from 3G (Mobile phones) to HD (Broadcast) and everything in between. H.264 is now mandatory for the HD-DVD and Blu-ray specifications (the two formats for high-definition DVDs) and ratified in the latest versions of the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasters) and 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) standards.

What is HE-AAC?
A: AAC is standard audio format defined in the MPEG-4 video standard, and is also the default audio format of the Apple iPod, and the standard audio format for Sony’s PlayStation 3. Flash Player supports HE-AAC v2. HE-AAC v2 is an extension of AAC that uses Spectral Band Replication (SBR) and Parametric Stereo (PS) techniques to increase coding efficiency at low bitrates.

What audio and video standards does Flash Player 9 Update 3 implement?
Flash Player will support subsets of the MPEG-4 standards and the 3GPP timed text format as defined by the following:
* ISO/IEC 14496-3 - Audio AAC: AAC Main, AAC LC, SBR
* ISO/IEC 14496-10 - Video AVC: Base (BP), Main (MP), High (HiP). All levels are supported.
* ISO/IEC 14496-12 - Container: 1 audio and 1 video
* 3GPP TS 26.245 - Timed text

Does H.264 in Flash Player support alpha channel?
No. Our first implementation does not support alpha channels using H.264, but we plan to implement this feature in the next major release.

Will I be able to multiplex H.264 video and AAC audio into the current FLV container format?
Adobe encourages customers to use the new MPEG-4-based file format. The new file format is designed to work with the features of these codecs.

Will I be able to put On2 VP6 streams into the new MPEG-4-based file format?
The Flash Player 9 beta will not playback On2 VP6 encoded video in the new file format.

Can I play back the same H.264 video files that I use on my iPod?
Yes, Flash Player can playback any H.264/AAC files that play on the iPod provided they are not protected by FairPlay DRM.

Will Flash Player 9 Update 3 support non-FLV files/extensions?
Yes, with this update, Flash Player will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2.

What are the minimum system requirements for viewing H.264-based content in Flash Player?
The minimum system requirements for viewing H264-based content will be similar to other media players supporting H264 in the market today. There will be a full list of system requirements and their associated playback capabilities posted on adobe.com when Flash player 9 is released.

Will H.264 be included in AIR? When will it appear in the AIR Labs releases?
Yes, H.264 will be included in AIR 1.0. It is expected to be available to AIR developers in a public beta on Adobe Labs later this year.

Will the Adobe Flash Media Server support H.264 content?
Yes, the next version of Flash Media Server will support streaming of H.264 content and AAC content - both live and on demand. More details on this will be released later in the year.

Will there be an updated FLV File Format Specification? When will it be available?
Yes, Adobe plans to make the updated specification available after the final release. The specification will describe the new MPEG-4-based file format container supported by Adobe Flash Player.

When will Flash Player 9 Update 3 ship?
Flash player 9 Update 3 is expected to be available from the Adobe Flash Player Download Center later this Fall.

What parts of the H.264 license are included when I buy Adobe Products?
The end user license to the Adobe Flash Player allows users to playback H.264 content for your own non-commercial use. Commercial use of the Flash Player to decode H.264 video may require a separate license.

What are H.264’s licensing terms?
Licensing terms for H.264 are available at www.mpegla.com and www.vialicensing.com.

What is MPEG LA?
MPEG LA is in the business of offering users access under one license to essential patents for standards-based technologies owned by many patent holders. MPEG LA provides these licenses as a convenience to the market in order to save users the time and expense of negotiating individual licenses with multiple patent owners and the resulting payment of many separate royalties. The licenses offered by MPEG LA include patents that are essential to implementation of H.264.

When does MPEG LA require payment of a use fee or royalty, and do I need my own license for H.264 ?
MPEG-LA has a number of categories where parties may be required to obtain a license and pay a royalty. Categories include: AVC Products, Title-By-Title Video, Subscription AVC Video, and Internet Broadcast AVC video, among others. Most categories apply to commercial uses and implementations, but some apply more broadly. Whether the license applies to your use; the applicable royalty; and the threshold for application of the royalty varies for each category. You will need to contact MPEG LA or review the license terms to determine if your use falls within a particular category. MPEG LA has posted a FAQ (http://www.mpegla.com/avc/avc-faq.cfm) and has a Q&A Department (qanda@mepgla.com) for those questions not answered by the FAQ.

Grab the extension/patcher for Flash CS3 Professional from here: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Flash_CS3_Professional_Update

Documentation on its usage, etc. is also on the page with links towards the bottom.

For me this comes just in time to share with our user group members (Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group) - perfect timing actually as the Adobe On AIR Bus Tour will be rolling into Philadelphia on Wednesday, so this gives us a bit extra to talk about. Also, our “Hot AIR” contest is still open until midnight tomorrow night - more details here: Hot AIR Contest Details and here: We Need Your AIR apps for Hot AIR Contest in Philadelphia!

For those of you who are totally in the dark about the event - please visit the following links and come on out on August 22nd (this Wednesday) at 6:30pm to the Franklin Institute for an awesome FREE event.

Pertinent Links:

• AIR Bus Tour Philly Info: http://onair.adobe.com/schedule/cities/philadelphia.php
• General AIR Bus Tour Info: http://onair.adobe.com/
• Philadelphia Flash Platform Group: http://www.pfpaug.org/
• Hot AIR Competition Info: http://www.pfpaug.org/core/pivot/entry.php?id=25

The event is FREE but you must register here: http://www.eventsadobe.com/adobeonair/user_info.asp

Event Summary:

Topic: Adobe Integrated Runtime - AIR (Previously code-enamed “Apollo”)

Description: AIR is a cross-platform runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing web development skills (such as Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript/AJAX) to build and deploy web applications and content to the desktop. Currently in public beta, it has a rich set of features, with support for building both HTML, Javascript, Flex/Flash and Acrobat/PDF based applications.

FREE Food, beer, RedBull, cool prizes, give-aways and swag, software, and access to Adobe experts! Plus there will be some Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wiis setup for your gaming pleasures.

There is still time to submit an entry for the Hot AIR competition! Get your code together by noon this Tuesday, the 21st at midnight and get a chance to win some rockin’ prizes and demo your AIR app in front of the crowd.

This will also be a GREAT networking opportunity at a very cool venue - we have over 200+ local developers and interested parties registered to attend - come on out and make some new friends.

Bring your laptop and any code (html/flash/Flex) you want to get running as an AIR app and stop by the Q&A table for assistance from experts.

Event Date:
Wednesday, August 22

Event Time:
Doors open at 6:30pm

Event Location:
Fels Planetarium in the Franklin Institute Science Museum
222 North 20th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
lat 39.957846, lon -75.17247