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.

Sumner Paine, Product Manager of the new Strobe media framework, recently presented on this very topic to the FMS User Group. You can see the recording here.

If you haven't heard about Strobe yet, the official summary is: "Strobe provides new delivery and monetization options for video distribution. Anyone can develop modules that plug into Strobe media players and enable things like advertising insertion, content delivery and syndication, micropayments, viewer authentication, transaction handling, and business model controls. With an open framework, the future of web video monetization can be developed collaboratively with lower costs and faster turnaround."

Watch the recording here.

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.

Adobe Strobe is the code-name for a new video player framework with an aim to help drive standards for media players.
Strobe is a great idea and sorely needed. These days every publisher, agency, developer, CDN and ad network are rolling their own video players and integration logic which means there is virtually no best practices approach as far as industry standards go. Why? Because there are no standards as of now, and you can bet that video player A which was developed with CDN B in mind will not work with CDN C unless some pretty major surgery is applied to the player's code.

Strobe is trying to alleviate these pains by providing a player framework which can be extended through a plug-in model. For example the connection routine between CDN A and CDN B differs drastically. In this case Strobe should (once released) allow both CDNs to provide connection routine plug-ins for Strobe (these may simply be some ActionScript3 classes) which developers can leverage easily without having to rework their existing video player code - provided it is built on top of Strobe.

Connection routines are of course just one aspect. Other implementation points may include advertising insertion, content syndication, micropayments, viewer authentication, transaction handling, and business model controls.

According to the FAQ Adobe Strobe is planned for release around the third quarter of 2009.

Michael Hurwicz has published an excellent tutorial over at streamingmedia.com covering the creation of transcripts for use in Flash video.
In it Michael explains how you can use Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, Adobe Media Encoder, and Flash to to automatically generate a text transcript based on speech in a video, and then use that transcript as a captioning file within Flash.

One thing I'd like to point out (without actually having gone through the process myself) is that it may be preferable to keep the produced XML timed caption file separate from the video rather than embedding the cue points into the video, if that's what's happening. This would leave you more flexible if you had to, for example, provide multiple language tracks for one piece of video content, and even opens the door for switching the language of the transcriptions at runtime.

Check out Michael's article here.

Many of you may know that MIX09 is in full swing and Microsoft has announced not only Silverlight 3 Beta but also added some new live streaming capabilities to its platform.
Once of those additions is a feature called Live Smooth Streaming which, if I understand it correctly, provides the equivalent to Adobe's dynamic bitrate streaming by offering fallback bitrates if the connection speed on the user's side fluctuates. The term 'Live Smooth Streaming' is a little bit deceptive however since this service - as far as I understand it - is not true streaming at all, however it comes close to a streaming experience. Instead it uses chunks of HTTP progressively downloaded material to provide a stream-like experience. I guess 'Live Smooth HTTP Download' doesn't sound as sexy.

Another feature is the so-called Live PVR, basically a total rip-off of Adobe's DVR functionality introduced recently to FMS which lets users rewind a live event and catch up to it as well. Microsoft describes their service as a 'PVR in the cloud', and it runs on top of IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008. Ben Waggoner has all the details, mixed in with some marketing fluff.

While it's great to see competition take hold in this space I would really wish for Microsoft to be more innovative at times. Of course they are playing catch up with Flash on the Silverlight front, but I generally expect them to be more experienced in the video streaming space (they've been doing this for much longer than Adobe). We've seen a glimpse of the fact that Microsoft is able to innovate during the preview of the out-of-browser install feature in Silverlight 3, but the blatant copy of Adobe's DVR functionality seems a bit cheap to me. If copying can't be avoided then so be it, but couldn't you at least differentiate the feature a little bit, or top it somehow? That would really get Adobe into gear too and maybe speed up some of their own initiatives - I've heard they are working some new FMS features.

The Open Video Player initiative has just (rather silently) released version 2.0 of their player framework.
Open Video Player is a framework for building media players and currently features versions for both Silverlight and the Flash Platform (which includes Flex). In their own words: "The Open Video Player Initiative is a community project dedicated to sharing player code and best practices around video player development and monetization." It is supported by Adobe Akamai, Microsoft and others. Akamai in particular (thanks to Will Law) seems to be pushing the updates on the Flash front.

In short, this framework tries to encourage industry standards and best practices around video player development. A great idea since the video player itself must have been re-invented thousands of times by hundreds of developers. I now encounter clients who specifically ask about this framework, and adding it to your toolkit would not be a bad idea (it certainly beats the FLVPlayback component...).

My friend Jan Ozer has just published an interesting article about the specifics of YouTube's HD video (and audio) encoding parameters.
Jan's used a variety of tools to take a peek at the internals of the produced H.264 material and made several observations in regards to bitrate, resolution, encoding profile and more. One of the takeaways is that the preferred resolution should be 720p, higher formats are likely a waste of bandwidth since YouTube would downsize them anyway.

Check out Jan's article for many more details.

Not my words but those of the Wall Street Journal and Lost Remote, talking about the MSNBC Inauguration video player. They are right though, this player is pretty cool and the features can honestly be described as innovative: the Inauguration site allows users to highlight parts of the closed captioning transcript next to the video and then embed just the selected pieces on other sites, playing only the parts one has selected.

The technology used to deliver? No, not Silverlight but Flash (did you really think I'd blog this if it wasn't? :-)

It's a bit of a shame though that there' are a bunch teething problems with this player - runtime errors whizzing past when you access the player using a debug version of Flash, and the embed didn't work well for me either since it played the whole video and not the part I highlighted, and at times I got even served the mobile version of the site!? Could someone give the guys at MSNBC some ActionScript training please ;-) Ok, I am kidding, credit where credit is due and I am sure they will get it all fixed in time.

It's official: HD on the web is broken. And guess what: it doesn't matter which technology (Flash/Silverlight) you use, neither seems to deliver on its promises.

Take this post with a pinch of salt because it's only my own perspective, but I would say I'm in a fairly good position to report on the playback experiences I have had. My setup is slightly above average with a new 24" iMac, 4GB of RAM and a fast connection. Right now it measured 4.5Mbit/s which I consider fast enough for any HD content, especially if it uses smooth streaming, adaptive streaming, multi-bitrate streaming or whatever else the latest buzzword is.

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.

I know I am late blogging this but initially I didn't think it was that big a deal. A press release made the rounds outlining Adobe's deal with the NFL to stream the NBC Sunday Night Football games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com live using Flash video. As some of you may know, NBC covered most of the Olympics in North America using Silverlight technology.
Several sites were quick to announce that NBC Dumped Silverlight and that they ran back to Flash, and while the story is certainly a big achievement for Flash as a platform I don't think that any other technology got dumped during the proceedings. Remember, the Olympics are over - and the initial arrangement between NBC and Microsoft covered the Olympics - not the NFL, not the Premier League, not the annual nativity play.

It's great to hear of another major achievement for our beloved platform but I think we should chill out a bit and take the announcement for what is is, and not for what can be read into it. I bet Silverlight just needs time to mature... ;-)

If you are blood thirsty then here's more for you.

And I do not mean information on maps... No. Britain From Above is probably the best program on UK television at the moment - in my opinion anyway. When I first watched it I didn't quite know what to expect, I guess I thought it would be someone shooting video out of a plane for an hour. How wrong I was.

Each episode of this series focuses on a particular topic such as the UK transport network, abandoned industries or the transformation of London over the years. One really innovative piece which I found especially interesting was the visual mapping of information over a map of Britain or London. This involved visualising data such as landline telephone calls in all major UK cities, GPS data traces from taxis across London or the air traffic movements over the UK.

The BBC will be adding several channels to its online simulcast lineup shortly, including BBC Four, CBBC and CBeebies. This is in addition to the already announced simulcast (read: live streaming) of BBC One.

Viewing habits and TV consumption is rapidly changing and this announcement just underlines the obvious trend. I'm sure future generations will find it very strange indeed that programs used to start at set times. Of course the really cool thing about this announcement is the fact that Flash will once again play a key role, since the streams are likely to be streamed via the iPlayer or one of its live-streaming-baby-brothers. Personally, I'm determined to ride this wave... watch this space.

The full press release is here.

And the usual disclaimer for everyone not in the UK: sorry but you'll be GEOIP blocked when trying to access any of the BBC streams. Those fortunate enough to be in the UK must hold a valid TV license (yes, no kidding, even if you have no TV but watch on a laptop or mobile phone).

If you are using the FLVPlayback component in combination with a custom UI seekbar component then you may have asked yourself why the seekbar is not clickable. Many video players implement this functionality: rather than having to find the handle, drag it and let go it is possible to click the seekbar anywhere to jump to that point.

Fortunately it is ot too difficult to add this piece of behaviour. The following code is applicable to an instance of the FLVPlayback component on stage (instance name 'player') not using a skin but using a custom UI seekbar component (instance name 'seekbar').

Give that a try and you should be able to click the seekbar to jump to any point in the video (provided you are streaming or - if using progressive download - the video has already loaded up to the part you are trying to seek to).

The BBC have started to roll out an updated version of the iPlayer which offers a new 'high quality' option, delivering video encoded in H.264 at 800kbps. And wow, does it look sweet (unfortunately I cannot embed the image here as it's too large). And that's before you blow it up to fullscreen - I played it on my 24" iMac and the quality was truly impressive. What's more important though is the fact that this player is so easy to access, and videos play without rebuffering. Click and watch, it cannot get any easier.

This news is pretty major, considering that Flash Player 9 is required to play the H.264 encoded content. "Back in December of last year, relatively few people had installed the Flash player needed to play H.264 content; now almost 80% of BBC iPlayer users have it", says Anthony Rose on the BBC Internet Blog. Clearly this sets a benchmark and should convince any doubters that Flash Player 9's features are now totally ready for mainstream - including its hardware acceleration features.

I wish the whole world could access the iPlayer pages because it is an online experience that's largely unrivaled. I've heard that the BBC is thinking about releasing some worldwide content - you should look forward to it.

There's lost more info about the H.264 rollout on the BBC Blog.

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.

CBS have launched their redesigned Flash based video player supporting H.264 HD videos. Viewers are able to watch full length episodes of their favorite shows such as CSI, Criminal Minds and How I met Your Mother, to name but a few.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to bring up any of the content which I presume is down to geographical restrictions. Hopefully viewers from the US could try the player and tell us about their experience by leaving a comment below.

Forget spinning cubes with video stuck on their sides and instead check out the demo below. From Immersive Media, same the guys that brought you street view on Google Maps, comes an innovative new way to navigate 360 degrees inside a live playing video. How is it delivered? Flash of course.

Check out this demo. Once the main content starts to play you can click inside the video and drag your mouse into the direction you want to view. Make sure you check out the snowboarders at about 1 minute in - and follow them as they go over the kicker.

There are more demos here.

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.

Fabio 'Encoding Wizard' Sonnati has outdone himself once again and published an HD resolution video clip on his site. What's stunning about this example is the low bitrate of only 500kbit.sec, while maintaining an amazing quality.

Double click the video to go full screen. Nice job Fabio!

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.

If you haven't heard of the JW FLV Media Player yet then you must have been offline for the last year or two. It is is without doubt the most widely used Flash Video player on the net and best of all it's open source and free to use for non commercial projects. A Creative Commons License starts at a mere 20 Euros.

Highlights of the most recent update include:
1. MP4 (H.264) mimetype detection in playlists.
2. Automatic MP4 / FLV selection based upon plugin version with the "fallback" flashvar.
3. Better scaling and positioning of the "recommendations" screen.
4. Lots of bugfixes, notably with the often-appearing "activity" icon and with the javascript API.

The JW FLV Media Player is built with Adobe's Flash is an easy and flexible way to add video and audio to your website. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, but also MP3, H264, SWF, JPG, PNG and GIF). It also supports RTMP and HTTP (Lighttpd) streaming, RSS, XSPF and ASX playlists, a wide range of flashvars (variables), an extensive javascript API and accessibility features.

Check out the JW FLV Media Player.

Two words: jaw dropping. Check out this demo (double click to go full screen!) by Fabio 'I eat codecs for breakfast' Sonnati. Encoded at a mere 500bkit/sec this demonstrates just how well the H.264 codec can perform at low bitrates. Check Fabio's blog for more details and watch out for more upcoming demos.
I wonder if he will share his encoding settings with us. One thing I can guarantee already is that he set smoothing to true ;-)

...from one of Europe's biggest Skateboard and BMX contests. Freecaster.tv will be are streaming live in high quality Flash video using Kulabyte's upcoming two pass live encoder. Yes, two pass live...
Check out this page over the weekend. Sweet, this is my kind of event. Anyone remember the Muenster Monster Mastership of '89? Were you there?

UPDATE: the stream is now live and I'm able to offer you the feed live here. Check it out and make sure you go full screen! The quality is very good that it's hard to believe that this is a live stream! Bandwidth courtesy of Interoute, delivery courtesy of Wowza, player courtesy of me ;-)

FURTHER UPDATE: the live feed has been removed from this post as the event is now over.

Or streaming over download; or Flash over P2P, or online over offline. Who knows, read whatever you like into the fact that 8 times more people access the BBC's iPlayer content via the browser based streaming version (Flash video) rather than the Windows-only, P2P based download player for which the Beeb had received a lot of bad press. Why didn't they listen to me from the start? :-)
For those who don't know, the BBC now offers all TV content for online viewing, on demand for up to one week after it has aired. sorry, but the iPlayer is only accessible if you are in the UK. Silly, I know but then I don't make the rules.

Fabio has posted a very nice H.264 video on his blog which he encoded using the free FFMPEG tool. This file played absolutely smoothly on my standard, consumer grade ADSL line and while I am not sure about the encoding bitrate used here I would like to point out that the video looks tons better than the so called Digital TV signal that Sky is pushing down on me. And Fabio's demo was running at 1600x1200 on my screen.

This year will be an awesome one for Flash video. I hope some clever developer will add some interactivity and community tools to this sort of viewing experience. Whoever said that Tv was dead was dead right. Hey, that gives me an idea...

Adobe have just launched the prerelease 2 version of their Adobe Media Player (AMP). This second version brings the Player in line with Beta 3 of AIR, Adobe's cross platform desktop runtime, and it adds a few new features such as H.264 support, hardware acceleration for fullscreen playback as well as new video scaling options during playback.

Or maybe I should say pseudo-stream... but hey, at least the headline got you to read the post :-)
I'm sure that by now you all know about this popular PHP approach to serving FLV videos progressively, but with the added benefit of being able to seek to any part of the video more or less immediately - something that traditional progressive delivery is not capable of.
The PHP approach (which in the meantime has been ported to many other server side languages such as ASP and ColdFusion) is targeted squarely at FLV delivery, a format which may lose a bit of its popularity over the coming months as H.264 support for Flash video becomes more widely available.
But fear not, because the clever guys from code-shop have alread been busy developing a H.264 pseudo streaming plugin for Lighty, a very light weight and performant webserver. The plugin allows Lighty to serve up H.264 encoded video content in an almost identical way to the 'old school' PHP method. The implementation as a webserver plugin is also much more efficient than the script based approach (which itself is not bad at all).
You can check out a demo here.