News Latest Flash Player streams HD video

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/12/06/latest_flash_player_streams_hd_video/1

The latest update of Adobe's Flash player introduces H.264 1080p HD support but More importantly it also reduces CPU usage for all flash!

 

Just updated my player.

With Flash being used pretty much everywhere these days to easily distribute video, the new codecs are a fantastic addition. If only Apple could dump their terrible QuickTime format on their movie trailer site and just use this instead!

 

Lower cpu use is a bonus, depending on how effective it is i might even remove flash blocker.

 

bah, include divx/xvid i say

 

Better "invent" a codec that can do HD with less bytes to stream aka Jan Sloot

And i never got the HD quicktime trailers running on all my machines. But then again, it could be that my 'quicktime alternative' is doing weird stuff with HD

 

Finally!

 

@ Bionic

What?? You do know H.264 is like so much better then Xvid right?

 

Sounds like a great update. My connection is only 1.5MB though. HD content would probably make it cry.

 

Nice addition, although I still think Silverlight is a superior option to Flash. It's just about making it catch on really.

<A88>

 

so it is, i was confused due to quicktime never streaming fast enough for the video to play, whereas stage6 is perfect, even on the highest quality videos

 

Nice addition to Flash Player

 

Even the 720p ones have some performance issues on my 2.8GHz P4. Oh well, MPEG2 1080i still plays just fine

 

Er, what format are you talking about? QuickTime is a container format, and AFAIK Apple uses H.264 inside the container for the HD trailers. Or did you mean they should use Flash to embed the movie rather than QuickTime? I'd agree with that for certain.

 

That is what I meant.

 

Nowhere near superior. Flash is cross platform.

 

And the only missing OS for Silverlight is Linux, which is under development anyway. Agreed, it's still in infancy, but from what I've seen it's more capable and much nicer to code for.

<A88>

 

I have to admit, it's a nice feature. Bandwidth is nowhere near abundant enough for it to gain a lot of acceptance, though - I'd much rather download a file and watch it when it's done than have to pause the player and wait for it to finish loading.

Performance when playing HD trailers is about the same as playing same-resolution trailers from Apple Trailers in Media Player Classic, which is remarkable considering how difficult HD is. Using MPC, my system (2.2 GHz Sempron, 7600gs) can completely handle 720 and can almost handle 1080, but it spends a lot of time at 100% CPU and drops quite a few frames in fast-paced portions. On the Flash trailers, 720 runs about the same (~50% CPU). I haven't tried 1080 yet because my internet connection just isn't up to the task tonight.

EDIT: The proper full-screen function is very nice, but the scaling it uses is terrible. I mean, it's probably good for low CPU usage, but it really doesn't look good. And considering that my computer can almost handle the videos, and it's nigh impossible to buy a new computer which is slower than mine, it seems like they should have used a bit better scaling.