Silverlight would seem to have some attractions though:

a) It runs on anything or it will, including Unix
b) It's not from Adobe.

Bob.

Speaking of Silverlight, Microsoft has launched a beta test of a search engine called "Tafiti" based on Silverlight. It's actually kind of cool.

http://www.tafiti.com

John

Wow,
that is pretty interesting.
I see the BBC are developing stuff for Silverlight and Radcontrols have a demo for interactive online shopping.

Bob.

In my recent experience, Flash 9 (the development app) has some bugs and issues that are rather annoying, and almost sent me packing back to Flash 8 for a large corporate project, but I needed the QT export to create FLVs (which didn't work in Flash 8). Flash 9 is slow handling large project files (long animation sequences - esp. 2000 frames and up of vector graphics).

While AS3 was a nice development for coders (better security, better content autocreation, advanced class functions, etc), I can see Flash moving away from being a designer/animator/media content creator's app into being a pure software development app. It just isn't developing the NLE capabilities for media content.

While Flash is certainly a great way to deliver platform-independant content, the door is wide open from a content creation standpoint for an app that is much more in line with a typical NLE, but geared towards animation, general content, etc. Then again, other options could really suck at too many things Flash already does pretty well. :-) I will have to look into Silverlight anyway.

I just got the following email from On2:
_____________________________________________________

Dear valued On2 Flix customer,

With recent announcements from On2, Adobe and others, I wanted to update you on your On2 Flix application. As you know, our Flix family, Pro, Exporter and Standard, are some of the best tools available for creating Flash video content. We are committed to further enhancing this toolset and have exciting news we want to share with you.

ADOBE FLASH WITH H.264 AND AAC+
On2 has been working with H.264 for months now and this has made it easy for us to add support for the newly announced Adobe Flash Player with H.264 video and AAC+ audio. This support will be phased into Flix Pro and Flix Standard this fall. Details of how to upgrade your existing software will be provided soon. You’re probably wondering what Adobe’s announcement of H.264 support in Flash means to you. H.264, while comparable in quality to VP6, gives Adobe compatibility with the new HD broadcast and DVD formats. This allows Adobe to target Flash on consumer devices, a stated goal of theirs. With that said, VP6 will remain a dominant Flash video standard for many years to come.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me should you have any questions about our Flix solutions or our general Flash video directions.

On behalf of On2 I want to personally thank you for your business.

Sincerely,

Mike Savello
Senior Vice President, Flash Business
On2 Technologies, Inc.
508.965.0634
mike@on2.com

This is a post I put on the Liquid Forum on this subject. I thought it might be of interest to you here as well, and it contains a link to a demo I prepared for them.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Your questions. I will try to answer them and I have spent the last couple hours preparing a demo for you all in the BigRockies lab.

Will this codec be accessible direct through Liquid?

You can use anything that produces a standardized H.264 file. The previous consenus on this forum seem to be the one included with Liquid is very dated and the recommendation was to use Apple Quicktime Pro to convert an exported AVI file to an H.264 MP4 file. I would suspect Liquid will get an updated H.264 codec as it is becoming quite common but this is unknown. Apple Quicktime Pro will cost you $20 in the meantime for the latest H.264 encoder.

What kind of file will I be generating?

Well it can still be an FLV file, however it can also play MP4, M4A, MOV, MP4V, 3GP, 3G2 files that contain H.264 content. I think the most common are MP4 files, and MOV's if encoded by the Apple encoder or most other NLE's. The demo I made uses an MOV H.264 file produced by Apple Quicktime Pro from an AVI file exported from Liquid.

Is that file uploaded to my server or will it need to go through another product to create an SWF or are SWF's no longer needed?

The file say for example an MOV is uploaded untouched to the webserver. However as is the case presently you still have to call the file in conjunction the Flash Player component just as you do today, however it will load MOV/MP4 files eliminating the need for an FLV file encoder. The present Flash Video component can play this files.

There is a bit of trick to it for now. The present components cannot understand any file extension expect .flv, so what you do is just rename the .mp4 or .mov extension to .flv. An updated componet will be released at the same time the player goes live that will understand the new file types. Also Adobe will be releasing Adobe Media Player based an AIR (Adobe's new Flash ActionScript based Web App tool) to play these files.

Will the file contain a player (with controls) like Flix?
The standard available Flash has always had superior controls to Flix, and I believe is freely available. Once this update is widely deployed FLIX will no longer be required.

What will the finished result be?

It will look identical to the present display for the user, the change is to allow us editor types to deploy H.264 natively without the going through an FLV encoding. Why is that important? Two reasons, first of all it eliminates the cost of an additional tool, FLIX PRO is like $249, and more importantly H.264 hardware based accleration is becoming very common in new video cards improving the user experience.

The proof is the in pudding as they say. If you have installed the beta Flash 9 Player I have prepared a demo video load for you at http://bigrockies.com/h264demo.html so you can try it for yourself. If you try this with the old Flash 9 player you will not see any video, just a white page below the heading.

This demo directly calls an MOV H.264 file I just copied to the server without going through a FLV encode using the standard Adode Flash components, no additional compliation or SWF programming required.

If you listen closely you can hear the web shaking, this will be big, and we will be the prime benefactors of this new capability.

The beta Flash Player is downloadable from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html. As this is beta you do want to careful where you use this, it will may disrupt your existing flash installation.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BigRockies.com Your Home in the Rockies!

More options when it comes to delivery through flash are great, but this probably won't significantly affect us until next spring or summer.

You want people to be able to view your videos, and the advantage of flash is that everybody has it, but almost nobody has this new player ( it's a beta anyway ), and it will take a while before a significant number of people upgrade.

Use .flv and 95% of population can view it.

Use H.264 and 9.5% of population can view it by the end of the year.

I'd say at least summer 2008 before this news matters at all.

Silverlight is dead on arrival, forget about it.

deusx, I'll disagree and say that Google (google video , youtube) as well as a few other services will expectedly switch to this new technology. And since most users already have flash not even knowing what it is, and since upgrading flash can be, for many, a transparent experience (they still won't know what flash is), I'll go ahead and guess that the majority of the video viewing internet population can easily make the switch.

And without DixX or Xvid support, I guess that makes this is a Stage6 killer.