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Multibitrate Support Coming to Flash Player and FMS (?)

Posted At : May 7, 2008 8:04 PM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: FMS , Flash Player

Interesting. Apart from the cool 360 degree video demo I blogged about earlier today, there also seem to be new features on the horizon for Flash Player and FMS when it comes to support for multiple bitrates and seamless switching between them depending on network conditions.

Kevin Towes presented on FMS at NAB recently and towards the end of his talk showed some sneak peaks of possibly upcoming new features in Flash and FMS. The experience he demoed shows an absolutely seamless switching capability between video feeds, or between multiple bitrates inside one file. It is not clear if it is the former or the latter, but in any case it sounds like that this is coming and it will make moving between bitrates of a single clip much easier and smoother. So smooth that you can't even hear a break in the audio.

Unfortunately the direct link to Kevin's talk does not seem to work, but if you go to http://tv.adobe.com and search for 'Kevin Towes' you will find the clip. It's the first result that comes up in the search and the sneak peak is towards the end of the presentation.

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If you get the 360 .flv file you will see that its just a very wide video. Most of the magic is done inside flash player.

Regarding multiple bit rates I would say FMS will definitely be needed and with some buffering magic one can achive seamless switching. Progressive download would need to download all video streams in all bit rates :D.

# Posted By Naicu Octavian | 5/7/08 11:54 PM

Theoretically it's possible even today with pseudo-streaming. If a user's bandwidth is enough, you can switch to a different file with higher bandwidth starting from the next keyframe.

Of course there can be some traps, so theoretically.

# Posted By G | 5/8/08 9:34 AM

is that clinet sid eor server side code that do the seamless swicth ?

# Posted By klipsil | 5/27/08 1:54 AM

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