Streaming Learning Center

I didn't vote for George Bush in his second term; truth be told, I wasn't that keen on him his first term, but found him better than the alternative. But despite this opinion, I never felt it fair to blame him for all the awful events that happened on his watch. The Crash of 2000, Katrina, Enron, MCI, the sub-prime mess, 9/11, I'm sure I'm missing a few. Sure, they happened while he was president, but the seeds for all these events were planted long before he got to the White House. He just turned out to be the unluckiest president ever.

Now, I'm starting to get the same feeling about how some very vocal computer users are starting to criticize Flash. Slow performance? Must be Flash. Instability? Flash. Slow to load a web page? Gotta be Flash. Fan whirring? Flash.

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Adobe made some significant announcements at their MAX conference - I've included the first half of a summary by Stefan Richter, a Flash consultant and owner of Flashcomguru.com, a very popular site for Flash coders. Here's what Stefan had to say:

In what appears to be an on-purpose release of MAX related announcements ahead of the event which starts today in LA, Adobe have announced the latest version of Flash Player: version 10.1. Do not let yourself be fooled by the .1 release as this version is much more than just another point release, it is a huge upgrade to Flash and the entire platform, touching many parts and in particular mobile and media delivery. Justin Everett-Church has a great breakdown of all the new features.

From my perspective, the big news was that Adobe did announce support for HTTP streaming, which is a smart move that should blunt some of the momentum of Microsoft's Smooth Streaming/Silverlight/HTTP strategy. For my thoughts on this, see Smooth Streaming, Silverlight's Trojan Horse. Adobe briefed me on the new release last week; the only negative was that it won't ship until the "first half of 2010" which could mean 1/1/2010, or 6/30/2010. Whatever the release date, lots of live events will happen between then and now, and Smooth Streaming will be the more proven, better supported HTTP technology through the end of 2010. Still, lots more live events will happen after that, and HTTP is only one feature in a broad Flash product offering. In other words, it's all good, but many live event producers will be wishing that it was available sooner. 

With adaptive bitrate streaming, companies can post multiple streams of a video and let the technology sort out the rest. Contenders include Move Networks (Adaptive Streaming), Microsoft (Smooth Streaming) and Adobe (Dynamic Streaming). So which product is best for you?

Though overshadowed by H.264 in the news, On2’s VP6 is still the most widely used streaming codec in the world today. In this short article, you’ll learn what you need to know to produce video using the On2 VP6 codec, including the relevant configuration options and the cost of producing VP6 video.

All’s been quite on the Streaming Learning Center front as I spent the last week teaching several courses on streaming media production and encoding at the lovely Stanford Campus at Palo Alto. Other than a quick sneak peak at the new Final Cut Studio, which you can read about here, it was pretty much full immersion into the streaming world from a user’s perspective. This led to several conclusions about the future of streaming video and Microsoft Silverlight that I thought I would share.

As a producer of video on the web, you know that you're judged by the quality of your video. In this regard, many producers are considering converting from the venerable On2 VP6 codec to H.264. H.264 offers better visual quality than VP6, and the AAC audio codec offers much better quality than the MP3 codec paired with VP6. Starting with Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, you could play back files encoded in H.264/AAC formats. As of September 2008, the penetration of H.264/AAC-compatible players exceeded 89% in all Internet-connected PCs. No wonder they're switching over.

This article first discusses the issues involved in such a changeover, including the potential requirement for royalties. I then describe the H.264-specific encoding parameters offered by most encoding programs. Finally, I cover how you can produce H.264 video with Adobe Media Encoder CS4 and Adobe Flash Media Encoding Server 3.5.

Since its introduction at NAB Show 2007, Microsoft Silverlight has achieved a number of high-profile design wins — including mlb.com, nba.com, and NBC's streaming technology for the broadcast of the upcoming Olympics. Although Adobe Flash is still far and away the mindshare leader, Silverlight has established itself as an alternative that many web professionals must at least consider when choosing a technology for web design or web video. In this article, I'll outline the various roles that each technology performs and discuss factors to consider when evaluating the two technologies.