H264 for Windows Mac and iPhone

[Ed Dooley]

No it’s not clear Daniel. Twice in the last few weeks I’ve had corporate clients say they can’t view the H.264 Flash we delivered, and weren’t willing to buck their IT people to update. They requested Flash 8 compatible video, which we dutifully provided. The real world (at least the one I inhabit, which includes big corporations seemingly still in the Stone Age) still has a place for ON2VP6, whether we like it or not. And why shouldn’t ON2 provide a better version? They’re in business, they have a product, they improved it, good for them. Not everyone shares your cynicism about ON2 and their claims, Jan Ozer did a review for Millimeter a while back (last year I think) and had the old VP6 and a beta of the new one, and compared it to H.264 and VC-1. It did much better than VC-1/WM9 and looked as good or better for some things than H.264. I agree it will be great when everyone can use H.264 for everything, but we ain’t there yet.
Ed

[Daniel Low] “I think one could summarise by saying that it is clear (more so than at any time recently) that you should be delivering your content encoded with H.264. It is clearly going to be the future delivery format of choice (if not already); viewable using Flash, sliverlight or the iPhone (and many other mobile devices). On2 has, and always will be fighting a loosing battle. The sad thing for them is that they keep making stupid claims about the superiority of their codec over H.264 that are so easily debunked in most, but not all cases. – See Doom9 forums and here:

https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/webvideo/story/encoding_web_video_in...”

[Craig Seeman]

[Ed Dooley] “I agree it will be great when everyone can use H.264 for everything, but we ain’t there yet. “

But we are VERY CLOSE. It may be months or a year at most. In fact businesses that don’t move to H.264 will be at a serious disadvantage when dealing with media outside their internal servers.

On2 is fighting a losing battle. Codec updates are only implemented if the various compression apps use them. On2 is up to VP8, do you know any compression apps using it? On2 had to make what amounts to sort of another profile because it was too difficult to decode at HD sizes. Hence VP6-S and VP6-E. Because of On2 licensing issues compression apps had to make VP6 encoding supporting a paid extra and apparently it was very expensive for those dealing with enterprise level compressions.

Granted there are concerns about H.264 licensing (MPEG-LA) but it’s clear where the market is going especially when you consider that even Microsoft Silverlight will be supporting H.264.

[Daniel Low]

Ed, you make some good points.

Of course you’ll come across clients who’ll insist on last years technology because updating software in a corporate environment is fraught with problems.
Most large corporations I’ve worked with recently are still stuck with Windows XP for example (not that I blame them!) But for the rest of the world, and I’m referring to the vast majority of public consumers who find updating their version of Flash easy (it’s actually very easy), we should be delivering the best bang for the buck, and that is H.264. 18 months ago I would have been arguing that the worlds CPUs weren’t ready for the extra decode requirements of H.264, and to stick to what On2 had to offer but I believe that now it’s a different story.

[Ed Dooley] “Jan Ozer did a review for Millimeter a while back (last year I think) and had the old VP6 and a beta of the new one, and compared it to H.264 and VC-1. It did much better than VC-1/WM9 and looked as good or better for some things than H.264”

I do actually think VP6 was/is a great codec but for anyone to say that it did better than VC-1 and as good as H.264 has simply got it wrong. VP6 takes advantage of the post-processing available in a lot of Flash players to make video ‘look’ better. H.264 doesn’t use such filters and as such it’s not possible to make a fair comparison without a level playing field.

If you are saying that VP7 is better than VC-1 and the same as H.264 then that’s still of the mark but not by as much. Even so, VP7 or VP8 are very unlikely to ever become part of the Flash spec (or go anywhere in fact) and that kind of makes them pointless for a comparison with H.264. VPx codecs/formats are proprietary let’s not forget!

Jan writes some good stuff but even he gets it wrong, like we all do. I’d much prefer to refer to the testing done by the one and only Dark Shikari who really, really knows what he’s on about.

In the old days the evil Microsoft would have bought On2, pumped VPx full of steroids and offered it up as an alternative in Silverlight, but they obviously saw sense and adopted H.264 instead!

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Two years from now, spam will be solved. – Bill Gates, World Economic Forum 2004

[Ed Dooley]

We had to compress WMV files to WM7 long after it looked worse than anything else because of big corporate clients. As I said in my post, I wish we were one big happy family, but until we are we have to give our clients what they want, regardless of their backward ways. The corporate world is very, very different than average civilians. We even have corporate clients who have the latest and greatest at thier home offices, but still insist on old codecs because their other offices aren’t up to date. As for whether the new ON2VP6 codec is available, it comes with every compression tool sold since they improved it that has ON2VP6, and it plays in any player that plays the older one, same codec, better performance.
Ed (who wants one codec too!)

[Craig Seeman]

Just an anecdotal story why businesses will have to change their IT ways to survive.

I worked for a “big corporate” company which had a similar attitude you describe. Well, both vendors as well as their clients kept getting asked to re-encode stuff to appease “big corporate” company, said venders and paying clients were about ready to throw things at them that consisted of neither file nor money. “Big corporate” realized they may not get best prices from vendors and that their clients might well decide to spend their money elsewhere “big corporate” had to rethink how this IT attitude was impacting their bottom line.

While they didn’t make system wide changes they did determine that the departments who needed to play the files by vendors and clients could install the appropriate players.

[Rowby Goren]

It’s September 2009 as I add my comment to this thread. Does anyone have stats on how Flash w/ H264 penetration is progressing?

I would assuming that because of the rapid increase of online video (i.e. last year’s presidential campaign, YouTube, etc.) that we can expect Flash 9.3 and Flash 10.x to have a much faster penetration than the older flash — users just weren’t that motivated to update their players — but flash video flv/f4v has changed all that….

Also I would think that more online video surfers have higher expectations for features which are more readily available via Flash 9.x and especially flash 10.x. For example the huge YouTube crowd is seeing some pretty clever paid advertising via flash on YouTube’s home page that require the later flash players — especially Flash 10

All this means that sooner or later our clients will expect these flashy interactive, dynamic flash 10 (or at least flash 9) features in their campaigns.

Comments?

Rowby

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