H.264 Video in Flash
Adobe announced last year that the beta flash player supported H.264 video, and since then the latest Flash Player 9 release version with H.264 has rolled out and most people seem to have it installed (thanks to MySpace and other large social networks often forcing flash player updates).
H.264 is a more processor intensive codec than previous codecs allowing for much higher quality video to be stored in smaller files. Apple has been making use of this technology for a while now within their .mov offering, but the ability to play H.264 video with the flash player means that web video can easily take advantage of this technology.
I just grabbed the Transformers movie trailer from Apple (in 720p .mov format, encoded with H.264) totalling 105MB, and have plugged it into the flash player below. Check out the full screen quality!
Previously even with ON2 VP6 such quality would of required around a 170MB file.
Update 29th May 2008: I have uploaded three copies of the IronMan movie trailer to demo the quality of H.264 at various bitrates and filesizes. Honestly I have a hard time telling the difference in quality even on a 24" monitor. The 480p seems like a perfect solution for full screen web video.
480p 56mB
720p 121mB
1080p 197mB
May 28th, 2008 - 10:45
Note that you will need flash player 9,0,115,0 or higher to view the video above. You can check your flash verion at http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507 and download the latest flash player from http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash
Google Anlytics currently shows that approx 75% of users have 9,0,115,0 or higher installed already.