See the 4 December press release, and the Player 9 Update 3, Version 9.0.115.0 release notes.

"Supporting a subset of MPEG-4 Part 12 (container) and Part 10 (H.264), including baseline, main and high profiles, Flash Player can play back existing MP4, M4A, MOV, MP4V, 3GP and 3G2 content."

Anyone know an easy inexpensive way to do this yet?

Render H.264 in Vegas. Use JW_FLV_Player to put it on a web page. That player supports H.264 via Flash if the update has been installed, or prompts the user to download it.

That's the player I use most of the time anyway. I didn't realize it had been updated.

If that's all there is to it, I doubt I'll be using my Flix Pro ever again.

If that's all there is to it, I doubt I'll be using my Flix Pro ever again.

Not so fast.

A lot of people bail rather than "update their player," so there is some value to using a codec they already have support for.

Also, H.264 is quite CPU-intensive and may not run so well on older machines.

So it depends.

rendering straight from vegas works, but as Corsedesign mentioned ( and I mentioned when this was first mentioned, etc.... )

It will take at least until next summer before 70-80% of people have updated their players, and you do want people to be able to view your videos without much trouble.

Also, I've done some testing and I'm not convinced you gain much by using H.264 instead of flv. Footage shot well looks good either way, badly shot footage has a lot of artifacts even at high bit rates, with H.264 and flv, and file sizes aren't that different ( so far, need to test more ).

I did a test using that FLV player a few months ago and it was buggy. On my machine I see a red band across the controls that should not be there. Do others see this too? Admittedly this was a few months ago and may be fixed now.

(note the blue cross is because at that stage I was using the trial version of On2 Flix)

I make my own players and I haven't encountered any problems.

I'm sure it should not be difficult to fix ( I see red across controls ) , as it all comes form Flash.

From the mindset of one of the big boys.

http://blog.brightcove.com/blog/2007/10/brightcove-show.html

http://www.kaourantin.net/ seems to be a great source of inside knowledge on Flash. It looks like they are moving away from .flv

The new file extensions and MIME types will be the following:

File Extension FTYP MIME Type Description
.f4v 'F4V ' video/mp4 Video for Adobe Flash Player
.f4p 'F4P ' video/mp4 Protected Media for Adobe Flash Player
.f4a 'F4A ' audio/mp4 Audio for Adobe Flash Player
.f4b 'F4B ' audio/mp4 Audio Book for Adobe Flash Player

Video needs to be in H.264 format only. MPEG-4 Part 2 (Xvid, DivX etc.) video is not supported, H.263 video is not supported, Sorenson Video is not supported. Keep in mind that a lot of pod casts are still using MPEG-4 Part 2. So do not be surprised if you do not see any video. We should be close to 100% compliant to the H.264 standard, all Base, Main, High and High 10 bit streams should play

....

If you use progressive download instead of (streaming) make sure that the moov atom (which is the index information in MPEG-4 files) is at the beginning of the file. Otherwise you have to wait until the file is completely downloaded before it is played back. You can use tools like qt-faststart.c written by our own Mike Melanson to fix your files so that the index is at the beginning of the file. Unfortunately our tools (Premiere and AfterEffects etc.) currently place the index at the end of the file so this tool might become essential for you, at least for now.


This part looks good for Vegas users
the H.264 decoder is a remarkable piece of engineering, it is provided to us by MainConcept. It weights in at less than 100KB of compressed code which is quite an achievement for such a complicated standard.