Adobe Adopts h264 Video in Flash
So I was imagining a war of Web video dominance between Adobe and Apple. Would it be Flash video or QuickTime with h264 that would win. Supporting my imaginary war was the fact that Apple refused to let Flash YouTube video play on Apple TV an the iPhone, and instead made YouTube switch to h264, with Flash players not available on either platform.
But now Adobe announced today that a new beta of the Flash player will support h264. Not completely sure what that means. Will Flash be able to play .mov files? Or .m4v or .mp4? Assuming, of course, that they are h264 compressed?
Does this mean that the war was only in my mind? Or, is it real and Adobe has just struck a brilliant blow, assuring that Flash will remain the dominant media player, even though producers will no longer need to buy Flash to make Flash video?
Also, does this mean that YouTube will completely switch to h264 eventually? Maybe that is why this is happening? If that is the case, will be finally get good quality video at YouTube? Of course, current Flash video (On2 codec) is very capable of producing good video. You can see that on just about any other video site. But for some reason YouTube’s compression settings are too high. Or, I’ve heard they use the older Sorrenson compression instead of On2. Either way, I’ve avoided putting my own YouTube videos on my sites because I get better looking video from other services or my own hand-made video.