My friend Jan has a great article on H.264 video production on his site. You can read the first part below, and catch the rest on his blog.

Introduction
As a producer of video on the web, you know that you're judged by the quality of your video. In this regard, many producers are considering converting from the venerable On2 VP6 codec to H.264. H.264 offers better visual quality than VP6, and the AAC audio codec offers much better quality than the MP3 codec paired with VP6. Starting with Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, you could play back files encoded in H.264/AAC formats. As of September 2008, the penetration of H.264/AAC-compatible players exceeded 89% in all Internet-connected PCs. No wonder they're switching over.

This article first discusses the issues involved in such a changeover, including the potential requirement for royalties. I then describe the H.264-specific encoding parameters offered by most encoding programs. Finally, I cover how you can produce H.264 video with Adobe Media Encoder CS4 and Adobe Flash Media Encoding Server 3.5.

My friend Jan was recently asked by a client for a list of H.264-related references. And Jan figured that if these references are worthwhile to his client, perhaps they might be worthwhile for you, so here they are. For much more great content around all things streaming check out Jan's Streaminglearningcenter.com.

General H.264

Wikipedia - it all starts with Wikipedia, but you probably knew that. Here you can find all you need to know about profiles, levels and entropy encoding (oh, my!).

The Future's So Bright: H.264 Year in Review. Before you recommend H.264 to a client, or for internal use, you need to know that H.264 comes with some baggage, in the form of royalties (yes, royalties). In fact, depending upon how you're currently deploying H.264 encoded video, you might already have triggered a royalty obligation. Read all about it here, as well as why H.264 adaption has been relatively slow among major broadcasters and corporations.

Adobe is to discontinue the content syndication through the Adobe Media Player (AMP), essentially laying the whole initiative to rest reports NewTeeVee.

Personally I'm not surprised. The shows that were available in AMP did not really appeal to me and the format of a desktop media player was also not what consumers seemed to want or indeed need - Joost anyone? The 'iTunes for video' concept simply did not catch on.
Strobe, the new media player framework that was recently announced, now appears to be taking center stage and is being pushed as the way forward when it comes to building media players (initially for the web but we all know how easy it is to turn a Flex based application into an AIR based client), and the coverage on NewTeeVee seems to suggest that even Adobe had their problems when building AMP, contributing to the birth of Strobe.

R.I.P. Adobe Media Player, I won't be missing you though.

I know I know, I really should not feel as much Schadenfreude as I do over this topic but it's just too good to miss (and hey, any chance of something like this happening to Adobe and I'm sure the dark side would be all over it ;-)

Some may argue that this is not a big deal - you win some, you lose some - but MLB.com is no small fry. Cnet describes it as 'the Web's most successful subscription service' serving half a million (!) subscribers.
What went on behind the scenes is now starting to emerge as - according to Cnet - Microsoft points the finger at 'a series of glitches and conflicts between the companies'. Moreover, the lawyers are now apparently involved which sounds like a major fallout to me. MLBAM's CEO is even heard talking about an 'ongoing dispute with Microsoft'. Oh dear. Can it be worse than Adobe and Apple banging heads over Flash on the iPhone? Maybe.

I guess we'll have to see how things progress for Silverlight, but I still fail to see the real advantage of the platform, at least from a user's point of view. Sure, it must be great being a .NET developer now being able to hack away at a new platform, using new (and existing) tools, but what problem is this plugin really trying to solve? What does it offer that Flash hasn't been doing for years? I'm a developer myself and naturally curious, but so far I have had next to no urge to even install the Silverlight development tools (which ideally require you to run Windows as you desktop OS).

I know I keep asking this, but where are the impressive Silverlight apps built by the Silverlight community, I mean those that did not make the showcase pages (yes, we;ve seen the Olympics now. And Netflix. Next?), and why does it seem that all the existing showcases are built around a video experience? It's not all about video you know!?
Let's revisit this topic in a year. What do you think the RIA playing field will look like then?

My friend Jan Ozer has released a very interesting article over on Streamingmedia.com. Jan covers H.264's year in review and makes some notes about it's future too. Highly recommended reading.

Here's one of the category "how come I didn't know this?". At least that was the case for, I guess I have been living under a stone.
Consider this code snippet in AS3: What happens when you compile this and watch the Output window or Console? I thought it'd fall over, but in fact you get
Neat, I know. But I haven't known for long (it took Tink's code for me to notice).

I mean seriously, what is it that makes Adobe so attractive to Microsoft employees? Are they looking for blogs like this one to write a reply and feed off some link bait? That's clearly a successful strategy, especially when the same bloggers selectively turn off comments on such posts. How lame.
Why not tell us about your technology, show us how it's better, faster, prettier, and maybe convert one or two of us?

I am really getting bored of it. Whenever I attend a non-Adobe conference and watch any Microsoft folks speak I hear how bad [insert Adobe technology here] is in comparison to [insert Microsoft technology here]. Is this really necessary? Can Silverlight not stand up by itself, or does it really require a bashing of the other guy? I simply don't see this behaviour in the Flash camp, they are quite happy to show their work and let that speak for itself. Good on you.

PS: Check out the tag cloud - says a lot about Microsoft's focus. Borderline obsessive.

There's quite a lot happening on Twitter today (you can follow me if you like) and I thought I may post a few important announcements here.

AIR and Flash Player 10 on mobile is a big deal. The Google Android creator Andy Rubin was on stage talking about Flash Player 10 running on Android. There was also a demo of installing Flash Lite apps over the air on Windows Mobile and Symbian. About time.
More importantly, Adobe and ARM are partnering up and will bring the full Player 10 to a lot of smartphones. Adobe can also deliver Player 10 for the Jesus Phone - but Steve Jobs needs to give it the ok first. Apple's loss (and mine) if you ask me.

Thermo is now called Flash Catalyst. Nice piece of toolkit, rubbish name.

A 64bit preview release of Flash Player 10 for Linux is available now on Labs.

Cocomo is in public beta, but I told you that already.

Last but not least, Major League Baseball (MLB.com) are switching back to Flash for all their video broadcasts, dropping Silverlight in the process. That's quite a big deal since MLB have made a serious investment in Windows Media. Since their service is pay per view one must assume that they are quite happy with the level of protection Flash video offers them.

Google have announced a new feature for Gmail (Google Talk to be exact): free voice and video chat.
The plu-gin (which according to PC World) is a proprietary, non-Flash based system and supports Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0. The technology apparently comes from a company called Marratech which Google acquired last year.

While the encoding is obviously handled by a proprietary plug-in, it was reported that the client to view the video is in fact Flash. This is interesting, since it would suggest RTMP being used as the protocol. The Google blog however mentions only XMPP, RTP and H.264 as the technologies used... Hmm interesting. I'm sure some folks will dig deeper and report back with their findings. I have installed the plug-in but got nobody to call since I never use Google Talk. Help, I need friends.

Footnote: US folks can order some very good webcams with fairly big discounts.

If you have - like myself - promised to eat your left shoe if Microsoft does not add H.264 support to Silverlight (a codec which Flash has been supporting for some time now) soon then you are officially off the hook now. Unsurprisingly, later this week Microsoft will demonstrate the playback of H.264-based video in Silverlight. What else will they be adding? You guessed it, AAC audio support. Where did I come across that before... oh yeah that's right: Flash.

You can read more about it here (it appears to be Microsoft's own press department posing the questions in this Q&A so don't expect anything too objective...), and no doubt there'll be a lot of press releases coming out of IBC later this week.

As you may know, this website (Flashcomguru.com) is quite a personal affair. It's not a company website nor is it a place where I reach out for work and I intend to keep it that way.
Nevertheless a lot of the work I take on (yes, I do take on some which some of you won't believe ;) is a result of this blog, the content that's on here and subsequently the traffic I get from many direct links as well as the almighty Google (I just realised that I come up third for the term 'flash video' right after the Wiki entry and Adobe..!). Do you gather that I don't check my web stats very often?
Anyway, back on topic. I get a lot of work through my blog yet I do not trade as Flashcomguru, in fact I kind of hate that label since it suggests that I am some sort of guru and so full of myself that I would call myself one - which isn't the case. The name was meant to be for the site, not me, and came as a result of Flashcomstudio.com (hands up if you remember) and in hindsight I wish I had chosen a different name. But that's water under a bridge now. Ok, I am off topic again...

Beet.TV has an interview online with Max Haot, Founder of Mogulus, an online video broadcasting platform built primarily on Adobe technologies. Having recently raised another round of funding (apparently in the region of $10 million) it seems clear that there is money to be made with live video, and user generated live video in particular. All you Flex developers roll up your sleeves and get building...
The full press release is here.

PS: sorry, the Beet.TV player seems a bit buggy - and why do they continue to fail to de-interlace their videos? It's a checkbox during encoding for crying out loud.

By Jan Ozer, producer of Critical Skills for Final Cut Pro Streaming Producers

A while back I shared some playback performance numbers comparing the required CPU horsepower to play VP6, H.264 and VC-1 files. Briefly, in that test, I tested playback from the desktop using the FLV Player, QuickTime Pro and Windows Media Player, respectively.

While testing for my next training DVD, Critical Skills DVD for Final Cut Studio Streaming Producers, I rethought the test, deciding that it made more sense to test using the Flash and Silverlight Players, since that's how most of the audience would view these files. In this lengthy report, I'll detail the procedures and describe my findings.

I'm impressed. A mainstream Israeli newspaper has run an article about my blog in its computer section, labeling it to contain 'Everything about Flash'.

Guy Aharonovsky was kind enough to send me the article and translate it as well. Here it goes:

EVERYTHING ABOUT FLASH
What does the technology enable us to do.
A devoted website which was built by the ten fingers of Stefan Richter, Flash video expert, has become one of the greatest resource on the web for Internet video.
The website provides information about all the softwares, plug-ins and extensions needed to built Flash applications, include online manuals , and show tenths of wonderful examples by the best creators around.
Website address: www.flashcomguru.com

Whatever next? The New York Times? Please speak to my PR department (j/k).

Big day today. On one hand it's the second leg of the UEFA Champion's League semi final between Chelsea and Liverpool. On the other hand it's the first time I wanted to make a purchase for DRM protected streaming video. Here's how it went (and I can tell you know that I'm NOT watching the game...).

The background to this: I am a Sky subscriber, so I receive some TV channels via satellite. However I do not pay for the Sports package since I am generally not interested in that. Tonight's match however is only available on Sky Sports.

I'm not sure if you have ever paid to watch a video on the internet and even if you have I'd take a guess and predict that it was a rare occasion. It may therefore come to no surprise to you that demand for such a service seems to be quite limited. I personally wouldn't really know what site to turn to if I wanted to watch a full length movie that's just been released on DVD - sure such services may exist but they are definitely keeping a low profile.
I've heard that iTunes sells TV episodes (yet I can watch tons of stuff free on iPlayer so this seems pointless and it's usually more expensive than the boxed version!) but do they shift many units? I doubt it somehow. Who really wants a TV experience on their computer? I don't, I prefer the TV experience on my TV. What I could imagine myself doing is purchasing HD content for my Apple TV (which I love) once Apple finally gets their act together and provides the facility for me to hand over my hard earned cash.

It should also come to no surprise then that Brightcove just announced their discontinuation (which in normal English means they will no longer offer) of their Pay Media Functionality. In case you didn't know, Pay Media allowed 'publishers to sell or rent Windows media video titles directly to consumers via a Brightcove player'. According to Brightcove nobody really made use of the feature, and less than 1% of Brighcove customers are affected by the axing of the service. So out of all Brightcove publishers, less than one percent thought they could get punters to pay for a DRM'ed video. No tears shed here then.

And whatever happened to Joost, is anyone still watching that? Apparently it allows me to watch what I want, when I want. Hmmm, somehow that never worked for me and I could find nothing on Joost that I wanted to see...

So what's the deal here then? Do consumers really want to pay and consume video content over the internet? Or do they only like to consume, but not pay? Or maybe, are the offerings which would make consumers open their wallets simply not existent today?

In my opinion it's devices such as the Apple TV that lead the way. Choose, click, pay (now in the US and soon elsewhere), right from the comfort of your sofa, then watch on a nice big screen. I don't want to sitting front of my computer to watch a movie, even if it was free and HD. What matters to the crowd is convenience. The iPlayer experience in the living room would be a winner, hooked up to an easy way to pay. All that's left is for someone to build it.

According to this article, there won't be any support for Flash on the iPhone anytime soon. What sounds very much like a copout, Steve Jobs claimed that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" and that Flash Lite "is not capable of being used with the Web".
What he's trying to tell us is that the iPhone is underpowered to display most of today's web pages.

I personally don't really care much about this. The iPhone is still an outsider in terms of handset penetration. What would worry me more if I was in Adobe's shoes is Nokia's Silverlight initiative.

Did I mention how live Flash video would be big in 2008? Oh yes, I did. We've probably all come across the usual suspects by now and a lot of them are powered by FMS. And even if they're not (in the case of Justin.tv the guys rolled their own Python based RTMP server), it's still the same technology under the hood: RTMP servers which stream to a Flash UI.
Now apparently YouTube wants a slice of that cake and, as Sarah Meyers found out, they'll do it sometime this year. It remains to be seen if Google will put in an order for a couple of FMS license or if they will put their own spin on things, similar to what they did with their current HTTP pseudo streaming solution (check this post if you'd like to know more about that). But long story short, it's almost a given that the actual video will be Flash, regardless of how it gets to the server. At least I have my doubts that Google would use Silverlight :-) Of no, I don;t think Silverlight will support webcam originated video feeds... Bummer.
Well in that case, rock on Flash.

Sometime last year Fabio asked this question on his blog:
"Every day on the web new video related sites appear. Video sharing, video delivery sites or simply mashups, all Flash Video based. I'm very happy about this but there is a thing I can't understand and it is : why very often is video.smoothing property not used ? This is completely obscure to me because in my opinion a smoothed video is always better than a blocky one."

Of course he's right, video.smoothing is simple yet effective, once turned on your video will look a lot better. Take the following example. On the top you see the intro screen of a movie trailer with smoothing turned on, and on the bottom the same screen without smoothing (it looks bad because this video was scaled down quite heavily). Big difference, the top one looks a lot better.
Unfortunately smoothing (a property of the Video object in Flash/Flex) is turned off by default. To turn it on you simply set smoothing to true. Something like

But what i you're using the FLVPlayback component? How does one access the underlying video object there? It's quite simple really if you know where to look. The FLVPlayback component uses the VideoPlayer object under the hood, and VideoPlayer extends Video and therefore inherits the smoothing property.
Say you have a FLA file (AS3) with an instance of the FLVPlayback component on stage and named it flvpb. You simply need to add the following code to enable smooting: Note that you have to specify an index when calling getVideoPlayer(), but if you are not dealing woith indexes then it should normally be 0 anyway.
Hope this helps, go use it and tell your friends how smooth you are.

The Wowza team today announced a preview release of Wowza Media Server Pro which adds support for H.264/AAC playback as well as AMF3.
Looks like this space is hotting up and it didn't take the Wowza guys long to implement this feature. While there is no support for live H.264 streaming just yet it marks a significant step for Wowza. Whether or not we will ever see RTMPE implemented by servers other than FMS3 remains to be seen.

For three days that is - I haven't sold out just yet :-) From January 30th to February 1st I will be helping out at the Adobe booth at the Broadcast Live & Video Forum at Earls Court in London. We'll be giving demos on FMS3 and AMP as well as some fully fledged presentations. If you're in the area then why not pop by and say hi - I'm the guy in the Adobe shirt. Entry to this techy show is a reasonable GBP 15 and if you register in advance it's completely free.

Tinic Uro has posted a lot of information on the new file extensions that will be used by Flash video, given the fact that H.264 encoded content will become more and more popular and important over the coming months.
The primary reason for the move away from .flv for H.264 encoded content appears to be compatibility: Adobe want to ensure that a file with a a certain extension is compatible with Flash. The primary extension for H.264 compatible video in Flash will be .f4v. Other file formats include .f4p for protected media, .f4a for audio files and .f4b for audio books. You may still use .flv for these files (the Flash Player will not look at the extension anyway) but I guess this is discouraged. If you run your own web server then I recommend you add the necessary MIME types now (they are listed on Tinic's site) or ask your hosting provider to do this. I remember many issues a few years back when .flv became popular as web servers did not know how to serve that format in a way that browsers could understand.

More information can be found on Tinic's blog.

At MAX Europe in Barcelona I attended a session on Flash video in which Jens Loeffler of Adobe outlined the upcoming DRM features in Flash video. This was the first time I heard any technical details on how this DRM approach will work and what it can do. What follows is my approach at summarising what I gathered and a series of photos of all the DRM related slides that were shown.

As announced previously, Adobe is planning to offer two forms of digital rights management which they call content integrity (slide) and identity-based licensing (slide). In a nutshell the former means that a particular piece of content is only playable if it has not been altered, which is important if you as a content owner want to ensure for example that a pre-roll video ad is always part of the main content.

We all know that Adobe is pushing put new products and services at an insane rate these days. Apart from announcing Share at MAX in Chicago there were two other products which caught my attention and which are very exciting and a bit scary at the same time: Pacifica and CoCoMo.
Let me summarize what I know so far about these two products/services and then tell you why I think some of it is a little scary.

It's not too much to ask for is it? If Real really wants to be in the headlines then they've just succeeded as I've decided to blog about this topic until this type of interference is eradicated. Maybe Real's engineers are simply bad programmers or maybe their marketing team decided that breaking existing content is ok as long as video can be ripped successfully. But Flash developers do not find this funny and I'm unsure as to how much good it will do to restore a Real-ly bad reputation of an intrusive and annoying piece of software.
In the meantime, this page on OSFlash is a good place to aggregate all Real Player issues.
Don't sit still until Real Player starts breaking your own content, blog about it, make a fuss. Once this Player gets pushed out on a bigger scale the problem could get a lot worse.

I put a question mark on that headline because right now this is more of a rumour than hard fact. However according to this article on streamingmedia.com, Mark Randall, chief strategist in the Dynamic Media organization at Adobe Systems, has allegedly stated that '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.'
This could mean that Flash Player 10 will contain another high performance video codec. VP7 is being compared to H.264 in terms of quality, but achieves the quality at a lower bitrate. The article also states that 'the current Flash Player 9 is, however, capable of playing back VP7 content created in other software tools and saved with the FLV extension.' This is not something I have tested yet - maybe someone else can confirm?

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.

As you must have heard by now, Adobe have announced the upcoming support for H.264 video in the Flash Player. I guess On2 kind of gave the game away when they shifted their focus somewhat into the direction of H.264, yet my jaw is still firmly on the floor - I didn't think this would come around so quickly.
The bottom line: a huge step forward for web video. The Flash Player will incorporate what is arguably the most versatile and most widely adopted video codec around (it's used for much more than just web video), and it's an open standard at that with a huge eco system of encoders and tools to boot. Let it sink in and expect some big waves from this. You will be able to test this out via progressive download (I know I will) once Flash Player Beta Update 3 hits the streets later today on labs. Both Flash Media Server and Flash Media Encoder will support the codec in upcoming versions.
Tinic Uro has the most comprehensive set of information on his blog. Go check it out.

More coverage here.

The most popular post by far on my site is the one covering pseudo video streams via PHP. In a nutshell, this method allows you to provide a streaming-like experience to your users without having to deploy a streaming server. This offers the benefits of a low cost architecture using only a webserver which runs PHP or one of the ports that users have posted in the comments, including .NET, ColdFusion and others.

Lorenzo Benjamin of xmoov.com has taken the PHP approach to the next level and added a bunch of nice features to it. He's also providing a productized offering around it which add some real value to anyone who's looking for a turn key solution. He's also followed my example and open sourced his PHP code. Nice job Lorenzo. I've seen other 'companies' take the code I posted and use it for commerical purposes without as much as an attribution, let alone posting their modified sources.
It's therefore even better to see all the efforts that people are putting into this concept, posting their findings, sharing their code and writing about their experiences. It also shows a clear need for a low cost streaming video platform for Flash video.

I'm following Keith's advise to post this alert. In case you haven't heard aboutthe issue yet, the latest Real Player Beta (and I believe all the previously released Real Player 11 Betas) can seriously affect the functionality of some SWF content that's deployed on the web. The worst bug appears to be an interference with parameters that a SWF movie may pass when connecting to Flash Media Server, which in effect breaks that movie's functionality.

To simplify, certain deployed applications will work fine before a user installs Real Player 11 Beta and cease to work once Real Player 11 Beta is installed.
This would not be such a major problem if the Real Player Beta was offered to a selected audience for thorough testing - in which bugs can be expected. Which is what you would expect from a Beta program. But this player is available directly from Real's homepage and it is the most prominent download link for the Real Player full stop. This in turn means that many users install the player without being fully aware that they are essentially downloading a possibly (and in this case a definite) bug ridden version.

One can only speculate what Real Player is doing to the content it intercepts but as outlined by Matt Spragins, Director of Product at RealPlayer, it 'loads its own SWF before other SWFs are loaded in order to determine where videos are located on a web page'.

Backgrounder: the latest Real Player allows users to download content which was otherwise destined for web only viewing, a feature which has been met with mixed reviews and claims of possible copyright infringement.

On july 25th Real announced that it was aware of the issue and is fixing this bug but as of today (August 1st) no update has been released and the affected version is still available from the Real.com homepage.
But hey, at least it gets people talking about Real Player.