After reading the title you are probably wondering , Huh? I’m out, what the heck is H.264. H.264 is something that you probably have used and never knew it. If you’ve ever downloaded a podcast, or any video form the iTunes store, or watched a video on YouTube you have experienced H.264. H.264 is a wonderful compression tool for video. It allows you to compress your video down, keep the quality high, and the files sizes low.

We are in the process of re-encoding all of our videos for our gallery section. We eventually will provide a online flash version and an H.264 video to download. What flash player can now do is play that H.264 video natively in flash without having to download. This also means I will only have to provide one video and it can be used in many places on the site. This allows us to place more videos online, which is a good thing for everyone. Currently Adobe Flash Player is said to have 98.7% penetration in the Web, making it the most used media player. Clearly a big win for H.264 advocates.

Again this is only in beta and may take some time to roll out once it reaches final RC. Still this is very exciting for everyone who watches and produces video. Here are some of specks I pulled from Adobe Labs. Also if you would like to try out the new beta click here. After you install the player you can see some video implemented with H.264.

Flash Player 9 will support subsets of the MPEG-4 standards defined by ISO/IEC 14496-12, ISO/IEC 14496-10, ISO/IEC 14496-3, and the 3GPP timed text format standard. Specifically, Flash Player will support the following standards:

* ISO/IEC 14496-3: (Audio AAC) AAC Main; AAC LC; SBR
* ISO/IEC 14496-10: (Video AVC) Base (BP); Main (MP); High (HiP). All levels are supported.
* ISO/IEC 14496-12: (Container) 1 Audio track; 1 Video track
* 3GPP TS 26.245: (Timed text format)

Flash Player supports 480p, 720p and 1080p content encoded with either On2 or H.264. Performance will vary depending on the capabilities and configuration of your machine. In general a 2.0 GHz Mac or a 3GHz PC, with one or more processors, will deliver an optimum experience.