AVChat Software Product Blog

A week ago we’ve announced that Adobe will support h.264 video recording in the next version of Flash Player 11.

Since then we’ve made some tests .

Here’s our setup:

• Flash Player Incubator preview version
• a special build of our video recorder (HDFVR).
• Flash Media Server 4
• a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD web cam.
• Run of the mill laptop with Dual Core Intel P8400 @ 2,26GHz CPU

Here are our conclusions:

• Recording HD (1280×720) H.264 video (main profile) maxes the  CPU  at about 20 fps. It would go higher in fps if I would have a better CPU.
• The sound is encoded with Speex, there’s no AAC option.
• On the media server the video+audio data is saved in a F4V file.
• The recording file can be played back right away trough streaming (sound plays ok).
• For progressive download/desktop playback you need to pass the new F4V file trough Adobe’s F4V Post Processor but there’s no sound. We’ve reported this issue to Adobe and they’re aware of it.
• Users will need Flash Player 11 or later to record h.264 video.
• We’ve not tested yet Red5 and Wowza.
• Both the Baseline (non cpu intensive) and Main (medium cpu intensive) h.264 profiles are supported. High Profile is not supported.
• All h.264 levels are supported up to 5.1.

That’s a good overview of what we’ve discovered so far.

We’ll be buying an 8 core desktop computer and a better webcam (the Logitech C910 1080p webcam) soon to do more tests .

PS: The Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD seems to be limited to 10fps when using the official Microsoft Lifecam drivers. We had to use the generic “USB Video Device” drivers from Windows to get it past 10fps.

Hardware accelerated playback of h.264 content in Flash Player 10.1 beta actually works!

Usually when watching any HD video on the Vimeo HD Channel my CPU would  spike to about 40-50% usage. But now, after installing Flash Player 10.1 beta on my laptop, the playback process is handled by my GPU thus leaving the CPU to attend to other tasks.

CPU usage with Flash Player 10.1 beta has dropped to about 10-20% (from 40-50%)!

For now hardware accelerated playback is only available on the Windows version of Flash Player 10.1 beta and only for h.264 video content, but it’s a great step in the right direction.

Adobe has released yesterday Flash Media Encoder 2.5.

FME 2.5 adds support for pushing high quality h.264 video streams to the Flash Media Server (or to CDN’s).

You can also push AAC audio streams if you purchase this AAC Encoding plugin for FME from MainConcept.

FME 2.5 also adds a few neat features like command-line control, auto-restart after system restarts and a auto-adjust feature that enables you to maintain a high-quality video stream in uncertain network conditions.

FME 2.5 can be downloaded for free from the Adobe website but it is currently only available for Windows.

Also I want to remind you that AVConference can display a video/audio stream coming from FME via FMS. Users will see the video stream coming from FME just as another user in the users list. You can read more details about this feature here.

Using FMS3 and FME 2.5 you will now be able to push high quality video streams to your users logged into AVConference. Some of our customers are using a similar setup to push video feeds from classrooms, training sessions and studio interviews.

More links:
FME product page on the Adobe website

We’ve got a lot of emails on these topics recently so we decided to clarify the issue here.

Adobe announced support for h.264 video in Flash Player in August 2007 in this press release.

Adobe announced Flash Media Server 3 and Flash Media Encoder 2 in September 2007 in this press release.

Prerecorded h.264 video

Right now the latest Flash Player Beta Update available on Adobe Labs only supports playing/decoding of prerecorded video files encoded with h.264 and delivered using progressive download.

To deliver prerecorded h.264 video files to Flash Player applications (video players, etc…) using streaming we need to wait for Flash Media Server 3 due to be released in Spring 2008.

Flash Media Server 2 can only stream prerecorded .flv files encoded with ON2′s VP6 or with Sorenson Spark.

Live h.264 video

FME2-> FMS3 ->Flash Player apps

To deliver live h.264 video to Flash Player Applications (live video players, AVChat, etc…) we need to wait for Flash Media Encoder 2 and Flash Media Server 3 to be released. At that time we will be able to push live h.264 video feeds from FME2 to Flash Player Apps via FMS3.

Flash Player apps-> FMS3 ->Flash Player apps

If Flash Player will ever support encoding live video with h.264, then we will be able to deliver live h.264 video feeds from Flash Player applications (video chat software, etc.) to Flash Player apps (video players, etc.) using FMS3 as a streaming server!

Right now Flash Player can only encode live video using the older Sorenson Spark (h.263) video codec.