Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 24th Feb 2008 21:55 UTC, submitted by Punktyras
"The immense popularity of sites like YouTube has unexpectedly turned Flash Video into one of the de facto standards for Internet video. The proliferation of sites using FLV has been a boon for remix culture, as creators made their own versions of posted videos. And thus far there has been no widespread DRM standard for Flash or Flash Video formats; indeed, most sites that use these formats simply serve standalone, unencrypted files via ordinary web servers. Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software."
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Member since:2005-06-30
Member since:2006-09-10
Member since:2006-07-28
Whilst the file may be smaller the processor requirements to decode that file are, probably, much higher. It actually depends which level of H264 one uses. There are "lo-def" versions of the specification. More advanced uses (backwards and forwards prediction capabilities, key frame abilities and lots of complex motion prediction stages plus a more complex bit encoding technique) will require more compute power and storage.
There is a trade off to be made. The more compression applied to a signal, whilst resulting in a drop in bandwidth required for transmission, necessitates an increase in compute bandwidth at the decompression end. The third dimension on this graph would be signal to noise ratio.
Member since:2006-10-12
Youtube chose Flash for business decision. Trying to add more restriction might hurt Adobe in long term because companies can switch to another format at anytime. Concerning the adoption of H264 inside flash container, that would be really a bad idea because that format only suit for a small group. The majority of users don't have high Personal Computer specification nor larger bandwith online and don't care about the quality as long it is viewable. Why not adopting a more open format where companies and community contribute altogether without further restriction?
YouTube actually chose Flash and H.264; all videos uploaded since around June 2006 have been automatically encoded as H.264, and a lot of the older ones have been progressively transcoded too.
H.264 is designed to be a jack-of-all-trades of CODECs; low bitrate H.264 is comparable to low bitrate Flash, at the mid-level, it's comparable (whilst using less space, generally) to Xvid/DivX, and it also makes for decent high-def. It's also a CODEC that balances being patent-encumbered with widespread support quite well; the patent rules on it are clear (as it's part of the MPEG suite), and everything from mobile phones to PVRs support it. It's not open in the same way that Theora is, but Theora is, frankly, crap, and doesn't have any mainstream support (outside of desktop Linux distributions, where VLC and mplayer are often installed by default).
Insofar as Adobe are concerned, they wouldn't have built DRM support for Flash/Media Server unless customers were asking for it. It's not mandatory—not every .flv is going to be DRM'd, but some of them most definitely will be.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Youtube chose Flash for business decision. Trying to add more restriction might hurt Adobe in long term because companies can switch to another format at anytime. Concerning the adoption of H264 inside flash container, that would be really a bad idea because that format only suit for a small group. The majority of users don't have high Personal Computer specification nor larger bandwith online and don't care about the quality as long it is viewable. Why not adopting a more open format where companies and community contribute altogether without further restriction?