Flash and H.264: Together At Last

Adobe's latest version of the Flash Player puts two powerful video
codecs in a single, integrated platform.

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).

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