Sunday, March 30, 2008

Beet.TV on The Rise of H.264 and High Quality Online Video

Online video quality is on the rise this year now that Flash Player supports playback of H.264. Adobe announced this last December with it's release of Flash Player 9 and a growing number of video distribution platforms now offer high quality and high definition H.264 encoded video.

Andy Plesser has been using H.264 and he's seen a dramatic increase in the quality of his videos on Beet.TV and Blip.TV. In his recent post, Adobe's New Flash Codec is "Everyman's HD Platform"....has Improved Beet Stream on YouTube and Blip, he said, "We get a lot of compliments about the quality of our video. Using H.264 has been key to the improved quality... I have come to think of H.264 as a kind of everyman's HD video production and distribution platform."

Plesser described the video workflow as only a few step process (1) shoot the video (2) edit video with Apple's Final Cut Pro 6 (3) export H.264 encoded .mov file. For producers and editors this really streamlines the process since you don't have to render a file that would then need to be imported into a stand alone compression program. He included this video of a conversation he had with Kevin Towes Adobe's Technical Product manager for Flash Media Server (FMS) who as Plesser says, "gives an overview of the evolution of the Adobe Flash Player and the various codecs that have been used over the years. He explains the significance of the introduction of H.264."




Towes was also interviewed by David Berlind, formerly of ZDNet, in a blog post titled, Between H.264 & 90% price drop, will Adobe’s new media servers mean more YouTubes? The post dates back to December 2007 and includes an mp3 file of the interview.

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