ASVGuy::SWFBlog

Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2 (MovieStar): H.264, HE-ACC support

This is huge news for web video and for Flash in general. As a result this has been already covered a lot, but if you are blogging about Flash or web, you cannot skip this kind of news.

Here are some links:

• What just happened to video on the web? by Tinic Uro
• Big day for web video: Adobe announces support for H.264 and HE-AAC in Flash Player, and Moviestar premieres on Adobe Labs by Emmy Huang
• The H.264 Announcement in Black and White by Ryan Steward
• New Flash Player plays MP4s, Quicktime video, even music from your iPod! by Aral Balkan
• The Bomb: Flash Player To Support H.264 Video by Stefan Richter (Flashcomguru)
• Flash Player to support H.264 video (FlashMagazine)

Here are my notes:

• Build number for this version (Beta 2) is 9.0.60.184. Update 3 Beta 1 was released in June (build 9.0.60.120). Release is expected 'later this Fall' (for the northern hemisphere).
• Available at Adobe Labs. Windows installer size increase is around 200 KB, haven't checked the player size yet. Because only browser players are available these new features/codecs won't work inside Flash (which uses an internal player). Update: The toll is around 100 KB.
• H.264 video (ISO/IEC 14496-12, ISO/IEC 14496-10, ISO/IEC 14496-3) and HE-ACC v2 audio support (also hardware accelerated fullscreen video for Linux) is new. Multi-core and hardware accelerated fullscreen video support also applies to the new H.264. I was somewhat expecting a move like this from Adobe, as Silverlight had a strong point about video, but I was, too, surprised as many to see this so soon.
• This is huge because these are industry standard codecs also used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
• We'll be able to play .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov and .3gp files with the new Player (Xvid, DivX not supported). There will be no need to install Quicktime (and I don't) for viewing Quicktime video.
• I'm not sure about the future of FLV format as a container format. But it will be around and current codecs will, of course, be supported at least for backwards compatibility. You can even have H.264 in a FLV but this is 'not encouraged'. I'm a bit sorry about this.
• The new codecs also mean AIR desktop applications will be able to deliver standard HD quality content.

Speaking of AIR, also on the Adobe Labs you can now find beta 1 of Adobe AIR update for Flash CS3 which lets you target AIR from within Flash CS3.

Flash Video Player 3.8 Adds Captionate Support

Jeroen Wijering's FLV Player is a well known and regarded, Creative Commons licensed, FLV player. Not everyone who makes use of FLV files needs to have Flash authoring tool. Jeroen Wijering's FLV Player is easily configurable, has many options and plug-ins.

Today version 3.8 was released which added support for Captionate embedded captions. It supports multiple language tracks too, one at a time.

Let me show you how easy it is to use Captionate captions with it: Configuration is done by adding variables (flashvars) in HTML. There's even an online wizard to help you, but modifying the sample HTML will be straightforward enough for most. Anyway, assuming your SWFObject is named 'swf', all you need to do is add the following line to the script in your web page:

swf.addVariable("captions","captionate");

This will display the first, default, language track. To display another tack just add the track number, like:

swf.addVariable("captions","captionate2");

which will display the 3rd language track. (Omitting the number means track 0, which is the value "captionate0").

You can see accessibility examples of the player online. BTW, I love full screen Flash video ...

Adobe FLVCheck

Adobe FLVCheck tool is available at Adobe labs (Windows only)...

"The Adobe FLVCheck tool allows you to modify FLV files that are created by non-Adobe technology so that they conform to the Adobe FLV file specification. Malformed messages inside the FLV file have been found to disrupt the quality of service when watching Flash Video over the Macromedia Flash Media Server. To ensure your FLV files are properly formed, use this FLVCheck tool to check the FLV files before you let others see them."

Seems targeted to fix FLVs for FMS use, nevertheless may come in handy other times too.

Captionate at Adobe Flash Developer Center

Michael A. Jordan's article titled 'Captioning Flash video with Captionate and the captioning-supported FLVPlayback component skins' was published at Adobe Flash Developer Center on May 7th. (Technically it's still May 7th in the US, but in my time zone it's 8th).

The demo on the first page is something we should have done for Captionate long time ago, but never found the time.

"[The] tutorial teaches you how to add captions to your Flash video files using Captionate or cue points, and how to display those captions in a Flash movie using the FLVPlayback component and the FLVPlayback component skins with captioning support".

If you want to learn about Captionate, or FLV captioning, go to that article. (Note that the skins and the article is for AS2/Flash 8. Flash CS3 support in Captionate will arrive in June).

FLV Metadata Viewer Beta

We have just released beta of FLVMDV: Free, Windows XP property sheet extension that displays FLV info (like dimensions, codecs, duration) and also the contents of the embedded onMetaData event for FLV (Flash video) files.

We also released FLVMDI 2.9 two days ago, which can now extract onMetaData event data as an XML file, but having the info in file properties dialog is sometimes more convenient.

Please let us know of any issues, suggestions.

Captionate 2.0 Released!

Captionate, FLV (Flash Video) captioning solution, version 2.0 has been just released. New version supports Flash 8 Video Encoder cue points as a new data type. Also new values in the MetaData and On2 VP6 codec is supported.

Verison 2 is a free upgrade to all current version 1.x users. Please contact us at support@captionate.com for more information on receiving your upgrade. (Please write from your registered address, displayed in the about box of Captionate, or provide your order ID).

FLV Players

FLV (Flash Video) format has great potential, but IMHO lack of a free stand alone player by Macromedia is not doing any good for popularity of the format. Nevertheless, there are free stand alone FLV players.

Martijn de Visser's FLV Player is probably the best known (version 1.02 was released on May 3, 2004). Guy Watson, aka FlashGuru, also recently released a free Flash Video Player. We will definitely see FLV format around more and more - announced VP6 codec support is coming soon with 8ball, so it's a good idea to grab a free player now...

On a related note, Michael Jordan recently featured a Captionate enabled online player on his site. The player is an enhanced version of the Macromedia's Flash Video Kit player which supports displaying captions embedded by Captionate...

FLV MetaData Injector 2.0 - Released!

After two months in beta, and only one bug found and fixed, we have released 2.0 version of our FLV MetaData Injector tool (free, Windows only).

This version adds lastkeyframetimestamp value, which is useful because most of the time you cannot seek after that point. Duration is more conservatively calculated and will be equal to lasttimestamp value more. onLastSecond event is injected at 1 second before the FLV end, which helps to get a notification that the FLV is about to end. Also a bug with framerate calculation has been fixed.

This version is actually a complete rewrite, using our new FLV library which is also used in Captionate. That's why we had the public beta for two months (Our betas normally last at most a month).

FAQ section of the site was also updated. If you have tips to share about using onMetaData events or FLVMDI in general, please let us know.

Related earlier posts:

FLV MetaData Injector 2.0 - Public Beta

FLV MetaData Injector - released!

FLV MetaData Injector - Public Beta

Captionate 1.0 released!

We have released Captionate, a Windows FLV captioning solution, a few hours ago.

Captionate embeds multi language captioning data into Flash video files and you receive callbacks for the data via events like onCaption. It provides an easy to use interface to enter caption and marker (cue point) data with a preview and fully supports Unicode on Windows XP/2K.

Web site is currently under construction, but the help file is available for download if you are interested in learning more.

Update: October 15, 2005, Captionate 2.0 released.