Adobe’s new flash player will support streaming or progressive playback of H264 encoded video files (.mp4, .m4v, .mov and more…).

There’s lots of very important info in the above link and anyone using video on the web should read it. This caught my eye:

Will it be possible to place H.264 streams into the traditional FLV file structure? It will, but we strongly encourage everyone to embrace the new standard file format. There are functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264 which we could not overcome without a redesign of the file format. This is one reason we are moving away from the traditional FLV file structure. Specifically dealing with sequence headers and enders is tricky with FLV streams.

It’s not exactly clear what he means by the “new standard file format” but I guess he means h.264 in whatever container you like (.mp4, .mov etc). Does this mean Adobe is killing the FLV (Flash Video) format?

Adobe has basically made MP4 (h.264) the MP3 of video on the web. In other words, it’s the default format. XBox supports it now (how long until Windows Media Player supports it?), Flash Player supports it now and of course QuickTime Player. permanent link to this post