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Note upfront: you need the latest Flash Player 9 Beta to watch these videos. This also means you have to uninstall your current Flash Player. I've had a few issues on my Vista machine (more trouble than it's worth) but it worked nicely on my MacBook Pro. That being said it runs on Vista now too, but not very well. I do have lots of problems with iTunes and QT on this machine and encountered another Stop error while writing this post... argh.

Watch the samples here.

The samples use 4 different videos. The movie trailers are all from Apple.com while the Backcountry clip is from Adobe. The trailers all use H.264 video in 720p resolution (1280x720), however the Shrek trailer is quite dark. Make sure you hit the full screen button. My 2.21Ghz Vista machine really seems to struggle, but it struggles with .MOV also. Also note that I haven't implemented any of the performance tips which Adobe recommend. Be patient, each video is between 50MB and 100MB in size. It's using a 10 second buffer - not recommended for dial-up :-) If things seem slow now then please try again later.

A heads up: the FLVPlayback component will currently not accept files with a .mp4 extension. I had a hard time getting it to work and had already rolled another player when I tried simply appending .flv to it. That did the trick and my mp4 files now use a naming convention of Rendition.mov.flv, even though it complained that the file can't be opened. trust me it can once you run it in a browser. I am sure this will be fixed in a future update for FLVPlayback.
The Flash Player simply ignores the file extension (once the file is loaded) and figures out the contents by itself by looking into the file. So even though it says .flv on the outside it's got H.264 inside. Note also that watching of videos does not seem to work inside the Flash IDE, presumably it is using an older Player there.

Lastly I am making my FLA file available for download. You need Flash CS3 to open it.

Have fun. If my site goes down later today you'll know why :-) Donations in form of a CDN account for downloadable content are most welcome.

There's some more great info on H.264 here.

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Comments
[Add Comment]
Stefan, the Flash player in Flash Authoring uses a different player than the ones that get installed in your browser. If you test in Flash Authoring the player still registers as 9,0,45,0 which does not support h.264.
# Posted By Brad Outlaw | 8/22/07 6:23 PM
thanks Brad, that's what I thought. Good to have it confirmed.
# Posted By Stefan | 8/22/07 6:59 PM
I have installed Flash 9 but when i click your sample link, all i get is a black page with text that says ' get link' or something... curious to see your work
# Posted By B | 8/22/07 7:37 PM
Hello Stefan, with this release of flash player, what would happen to flash media server 3?... and can you said to me if it would support as 3.0 the next generation of flash media server??? or what an we expect about???

Thanks a lot, i always read your posts! really and helpfull site!!!
# Posted By Israel Gaytan | 8/23/07 1:06 AM
Flash Media Server 3.0 will have support for streaming h.264 encoded files.
# Posted By Brad Outlaw | 8/23/07 6:05 PM
Here is another H.264 720p demo
http://www.flashstreamworks.com/video/h264demo.htm...

Crazy bit rate but really good quality.
# Posted By Jens | 8/24/07 10:28 PM
On a side note, I works only on a webserver... in my case http://localhost made it happen.

Glad by the example.

Best Regards,

JohhnyD2
# Posted By JohnnyD2 | 8/27/07 9:08 PM
You can see an exemple of flash H.264 here also :

http://www.kingofpunk.com/archives/143
# Posted By Tetsukin28 | 8/28/07 4:27 AM
@Brad

That's great but what about FMS 3 recording audio - is someone at Adobe doing something to get rid of Nellymoser?
# Posted By Vidizer | 8/31/07 9:41 AM
It doesn't work with my version of flash, it just says Get Flash and a bit of text saying I don't have flash.
# Posted By Lawrence | 11/21/07 5:55 PM
Latest version btw
# Posted By Lawrence | 11/21/07 5:55 PM
Stefan,

So far, I've not seen Flash support streaming standards (ISMA 2.0 for example). Do you know if Flash's intends to support live H264 vs. only progressive download?
# Posted By rich | 12/5/07 10:25 PM
hi rich,
yes FMS3 will support H.264 streaming, both live and on demand.
# Posted By Stefan | 12/6/07 9:22 AM
Stefan,

You said "yes" but did not mention if you know if standards (ISMA) will be supported. As far as I know, Flash intends to only support their proprietary protocols and not RTSP standards. It would be nice if they supported standards, but my sources tell me they will not. There are a lot of proprietary methods out there and I'm hoping this won't be another one.
# Posted By rich | 12/17/07 1:31 PM
I can confirm that RTSP will not be supported (and neither has this ever been considered as far as I can see). FMS has always used RTMP and will continue to do so so this not something that is 'new' to FMS3.
# Posted By Stefan | 12/17/07 1:47 PM
I keep reading that the latest Flash 9 player will "support" H.264 -- could someone please decode this for me and tell me if the browser-player will "encode" H.264 for use with FMS live apps (like the good old Spark codec) or does it simply "decode" for playback only?
# Posted By JohnTeal | 1/30/08 1:06 AM
I've seen everywhere FMS3 supports LIVE h.264 and Live AAC.. but i have not sean actual examples.. The documentation states Flash Media Encoder supports Live H.264.. Where is it ?? How do you select the Codec ?? how can you get an actual Flash compatible H.264 Live stream.. i have yet to see this actually happen.. if it is out there, please please let me know.
# Posted By Sam D. Sousa | 2/3/08 12:41 AM
After my last post (see above), I found a link for the LiveDocs for FMS3. A search for anything H.264 returned this:

"Your search for H.264 site:http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flashmediaserver/3.0... did not match any documents."

Not one entry for H.264 -- NOTHING!

which, after additional investigation leads me to believe that FMS3 and the browser-player only allow H.264 to "play". Meaning, the player will play it (but no encoding, still stuck with Spark for browser encoding) and FMS3 will stream a VOD (video on demand) file as "live" (but no encoding). You have to have a previously encoded H.264 video. Additionally, the desktop FME does not encode H.264 either (live or otherwise), only On2VP6. There are only two ways to get H.264 from any Adobe product -- Adobe documentation states: "...With H.264 encoding already available in Adobe Premiere
# Posted By JohnTeal | 2/3/08 4:46 AM
(got cut off, too long I guess -- contd.)
"...With H.264 encoding already available in Adobe Premiere
# Posted By JohnTeal | 2/3/08 4:58 AM
(got cut off, too long I guess -- contd.)
"...With H.264 encoding already available in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects software". Hardly useful for Live encoding. For Live encoding of H.264, you have to use (and pay a license fee for) a third-party encoder product like from KulaByte or DigitalRapids. So, to answer my own question, the marketing term "supports" I've now come to learn simply means "...you can play it, but that's all, with Adobe products".
# Posted By JohnTeal | 2/3/08 4:58 AM
An update to the Flash Media Encoder will add support for live H.264 encoding soon, it has already been announced. I suspect it won;t be long before it's released.
# Posted By Stefan | 2/3/08 10:51 AM
I would agree with you Stefan.. But nothing seams to be announcing a Flash Media Encode 3 and as stated in Adobe's Website.
Quote [
Robust, high-performance live streaming of H.264 and On2 VP6 video is supported in conjunction with Flash Media Encoder 2]
This is found here
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediastreaming/...

So i am still a bit left wondering.. I've sean Digital-Rapids and it does do H.264 live but not to a FMS or to any Flash Player for that matter.
# Posted By Sam D. Sousa | 2/4/08 3:20 AM
take it from me: FME *will* support H.264 live streaming and it will be released in the not too distant future.
As for third party vendors, I expect them to support live H.264 to FMS too. Best speak to them about timescales.
# Posted By Stefan | 2/4/08 8:48 AM
Hi,

You say : it will be released in the not too distant future.

Do you have any date ? a month ? during summer ? later ?

I'm working on a big project that need this, but I need an aproximative date I can give to my future customers.

Thank you...
# Posted By phiphou | 3/6/08 8:35 PM
Hi,

You say : it will be released in the not too distant future.

Do you have any date ? a month ? during summer ? later ?

I'm working on a big project that need this, but I need an aproximative date I can give to my future customers.

Thank you...
# Posted By phiphou | 3/6/08 8:36 PM
if I knew I would not be able to tell you. But my gut feeling tells me that it won't be too long now since FMS3 has been out a while.
# Posted By Stefan Richter | 3/6/08 10:28 PM
Great post, thanks for the example. Really stunning quality when viewed in fullscreen (24" monitor) and my 4meg connection just about manages to keep up.

What did you encode the video in? Quicktime Pro? I'm looking for the best software to convert raw AVI files to h.264.

Cheers,
Gordon
# Posted By Gordon Page | 5/27/08 12:57 PM
Nevermind, I see from the .FLA source that you grabbed the .mov files from apple.
# Posted By Gordon Page | 5/27/08 1:55 PM