Whether you have a corporate, social networking, or video streaming site, video instantly captures your visitor’s attention and describes your product and services quickly and effectively. Due to its large install base, Flash video is now the de-facto standard in internet video delivery. With recent updates to Flash 9, Flash Player adds the capability of playing H264 encoded video in full screen mode (as can be seen by looking at these videos - then expanding one of the videos to fullscreen) , making the delivery of Flash videos on the internet not only practical, but efficient as well.

Supported Video Formats for Flash

There are three different codecs supported by different versions of Flash players.

The Sorenson codec is supported by Flash 6 and above. It is the most widely supported format, but not as efficient. Flash 8 added support for the On2 VP6 codec. The recently release of Flash 9 update 3 supports the H264 codec. H264 is the codec used to encode Blu-Ray videos and is highly efficient. With H264 support, Flash can play HD-quality video over the internet.

If your video file is not encoded in one of Flash’s supported codecs, you will need to transcode your video. The Adobe CS3 Flash Professional development packages offer tools for transcoding video files into Flash-supported formats.

Finally, an issue with streaming H264-encoded video that you should be aware of is that most encoders put a ‘moov atom’ at the end of the file, forcing Flash players to read the whole file before video playing can start. Tools such as qt-faststart and QT Index Swapper move the moov atom to the front, so streaming can start instantly.

Conclusion

This is an exciting time for video streaming. With H264 support, online video is no longer limited to short fuzzy videos. Instead, video streamed over the internet can rival the quality of broadcast video. With all the advantages of video available on demand over the internet, it will be exciting to see what new services and features will become available as the latest Flash player penetrates the market.

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