Last year Adobe announced that Flash would support H.264 video. I hadn’t had the time to follow up on that until I saw this cool tip on the Videoblogging list yesterday. So this post is just testing that functionality - even though there is a “Flash” version that plays in the Jeroen Wijering Flash player, it’s the same H.264 file you’ll get if you click the “iPod” link. By the way, if you can’t see this video you’ll need to update your Flash Plugin. Another nice thing is that the video is compressed with the new version of Apple’s Compressor, which finally comes with some nice presets. The one I used for this makes a 640 wide progressive dual-pass video at about 1100kbps. It looks great on the web, on an iPhone and blown up full screen on a 24″ monitor.
11 Comments
I’m playing around with this stuff today as well - I’m on a PC with Firefox and Flash ver 9,0,47,0 - so it loaded all the way but kept showing the little twirly thing in the middle. Clicking pause/play didn’t do anything - the video wouldn’t play and I didn’t get any kind of error message
Hey Chris, I just tested this on XP with FF2 and IE7, Flash version 9,0,115,0 and it worked like a charm.
Hm yeah - maybe my flash isn’t new enough and doesn’t have h.264 yet - I’ll get the newest version of flash in a bit - but I think it’s good to know that it doesn’t give any error messages or anything if it won’t play because it’s an older player (or for whatever other reason it’s not working)
Yeah Chris, you just need to update your Flash plugin. I tested it on another computer with 9,0,45,0 and got the same result as you. I updated the plugin and it works fine now. It is too bad that you don’t get an error message or a prompt to update your plugin.
Thanks for the mention on Semanal08!
Thanks…it looks very good. Worked great here, I am impressed.
Hey Michael, I really loved it. It looks very good.
I’m not totally clear about the feeds (I never am - in all fairness) and I didn’t quite get the sizing thing, but having said that, I think I can make it work. I’m going to encode a piece using Vegas today, and post it and see what happens. From what I’m hearing - I could post 1 thing - have it play in flash, QT, SEMANAL and on phones and TV’s all with one video. This is huge advance.
Milt
That’s impressive. The depth is quite good (with addition by the narrow focus) and clarity is obvious. And it mostly carries over to full screen.
Hi Verdi-
I’m finally trying to get this functionality in my own site and your video came up. I’ve been researching the heck out of how to do this and was wondering if you could clear some things up for me since it looks like you have it working properly on your site, but I could not decipher your code because you are going through vPIP as well.
I’m using JW Player 4.1 and want to play H.264 as the default video, but if a viewer has an older Flash plugin, then have it fallback to an FLV video, as it shows now. It looks like JW took out fallback functionality since the 3.12 player? Is there a new way to do this in 4.1 or is it automatic? If so, how do I set the parameters to define the .MOV file and the .FLV file? Or do I just need one encoded file instead of two?
Additionally, I looked at vPIP, which looks great. I have two problems though. One is that I want the H.264 file to play through the JW player so that the viewer can get fullscreen video (can’t with QT player). Two is that I want to use vPIP on a static site rather than Wordpress, but am not sure if there is a version that does that. vPIP is not so important to me if I can get the fallback working well, but I thought for future functionality of my site, it might be useful so that people could download videos to their iPhones.
Can you lend some advice? Would be greatly helpful! Thanks!
Hi Ted,
The 4.0 (and newer) JW player works differently than the v3 player. I couldn’t find clear documentation on how to set up the fallback video in the new version when it first came out and haven’t had time to investigate it further.
vPIP was specifically designed for video on blogs and creating rss feeds from each video format so will probably not be particularly useful for you. You might be best of going with the embed config tool on the JW site.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the quick response. So I take it you are using the v3 player then to make it work correctly. I guess I will revert to that player or move over to Flowplayer temporarily, which seems to have the fallback functionality that I need.
I did notice after further research of vPIP that they do have a version for static pages, but it is not nearly as functional as the WordPress plugin. Oh well, guess I will have to hold off on that part. Thanks again!
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