The Rapid Evolution of Video on the Web
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Video on the web has been catapulted into popularity in the last few years. YouTube gave a kick in the pants to web developers, video producers, and everybody else in the marketing industry, showing us that the public is ready for much more than the text and graphics of yesterday’s web.
In this article, I hope to provide some valuable information to both web developers and video publishers. I’ll cover the rapid evolution from old RealMedia to today’s Flash-based players, as well as some of the most recent updates to the codecs available in Flash.
A Brief History
In the beginning, video couldn’t even be viewed in a web browser, it had to be played in a separate player. Beginning with RealMedia, and moving on to Apple Quicktime and Windows Media, video began to make a postage-stamp-sized dent in the web.
Soon, browsers began to allow video players to embed themselves in web pages. Users still needed to have special software installed on their computers. Microsoft and Apple gained ground over RealMedia by including their own video playback software in their operating systems.
Macromedia’s (now Adobe’s) Flash software has been around for as long as the Big Three video players (RealMedia, Windows Media, Apple Quicktime), however it wasn’t until 2003 that Flash really became a player in the video scene. Previously in the realm of animation and games, Flash 8 included a much improved video codec (On2 VP6) that put its video support in the running with the Big Three.
Today’s Scene
Adobe Flash is now the undisputed winner in web video playback. YouTube, MySpace and Facebook—three of the top five sites on the web—use Flash for all of their video content. The Big Three players still exist in various levels of popularity, but they are dying fast, and RealMedia is leading the way.
Why Flash?
So everybody’s using Flash, and that’s a great thing. It’s good for end users and it’s good for video publishers. From an end user’s perspective, it rarely requires installation. Adobe claims 99% saturation for their Flash player, with 96% using the latest version 9.
From a publisher’s standpoint, Flash video allows for a customized playback interface, as well as the ability to insert advertisements into a stream or provide a visual interface to additional video. Flash’s universal saturation is just as important for publishers, who no longer need to provide multiple versions of the same content.
What About Encoding?
Okay, Flash is the best playback mechanism, but is it easy to prepare and encode video for it? Short answer: it’s easy and it’s about to become a whole lot easier.
Currently, Flash videos are stored in the proprietary FLV format. FLV is the container used to carry the video and audio streams. The streams themselves can be in a few different formats. Older versions of Flash used the Sorenson Spark codec, but the only codec that really provided decent quality at a decent size was the On2 VP6 codec, released in Flash 8.
The problem with the FLV format is its proprietary nature. To encode a video in this format, you need to have software explicitly licensed from On2 or Macromedia. If you have Macromedia Flash 8 Professional or newer, you have the ability to export FLV files from any Quicktime-based application, including Final Cut Pro. Unfortunately, many editing suites only contain video editing software, requiring a separate station for web encoding.
But Wait, There’s More
In December, 2007, Adobe released a highly-anticipated update to Flash Player 9, which includes support for H.264 video playback. H.264 is the one of the latest video codecs, featuring very high quality video at lower bitrates. Part of the MPEG-4 specification, H.264 has already been integrated into many video editing systems.
Even better, the Flash 9 update supports non-FLV video files. This means that video in standard containers (e.g. MPEG-4’s MP4 and Quicktime’s MOV) will play in a Flash player. With no additional software, you can export a file for a Flash player directly from your video editing system (including Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress Pro).
This will effectively eliminate the middleman encoding step present with every other web video technology. Even better, these H.264 files are the preferred format for many mobile devices, meaning that the exact same file you provide in an embedded player can be provided as an iPod and PSP-compatible download.
Wrapping Up
So we’ve talked about how the latest release of the Flash player supports the excellent H.264 codec and it doesn’t require FLV files from a proprietary encoder. Unfortunately, even though 98% of the Internet has Flash 9 installed, it will take a few months for all of those users to upgrade to the new H.264-ready version (version 9,0,115,0). For most users, this will happen transparently or through a small popup.
YouTube has already made a significant investment in H.264, and you can be certain that if they require visitors to use the new Flash player, the entire Internet will upgrade overnight.
In the meantime, as a forward-looking video publisher, plan to be encoding your web-ready videos in H.264 and try not to look back at the ancient landscape of video on the web. It’s been a long, convoluted journey, but with these most recent changes, we’ve finally reached a sustainable system. We no longer need to worry about codecs installed on viewer’s machines, video producers no longer need to be streaming experts, and publishing video content can be as easy as publishing written content.
Stay tuned for more information on how FireFly, our content management system, is making that happen.
