Adobe takes on Silverlight (and sorta Quicktime)
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
If you’ve been following the recent browser plugin wars, you’ve probably picked up on Adobe’s announcement today of h264 support for Flash today (available in the immediately released beta version of the plugin). Its an interesting (and very tactical) move, an attempt to counter the strongest card in Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in - video support.
Despite the ubiquity of Flash video on video-sharing sites everywhere, the quality is usually pretty ropey - being based on the old Sorenson Pro codec (a codec is something that encodes and decodes video) that was introduced in Flash 6. Whereas movie trailer sites will use the much tastier ON2 VP6 codec, licensing issues with the codec mean that open-source encoding tools like FFMPEG are not able to export files using the codec - effectively crippling its by video sharing sites and most sites that have dynamically created/trancoded video (facebook etc).
So, what do Adobe do? Well they integrate one of the most widespread, high-quality codec’s available, h264. On top of that they also build in support for a large number of formats, containers and AAC Audio (effectively h264’s little audio cousin), and even allow Flash to read Quicktime Movies encoded with h264.
But could this also have something to do with a certain video-sharing site’s recent announcement?.
More in-depth detail with Adobe’s Tinic Uro.
