The present and future of post production business and technology

Looks like Jobs was right. H.264 makes up 66% of web video

Looks like Jobs was right. H.264 already makes up 66% of web video http://tcrn.ch/cHD2jI (including H.264 played via Flash players)

In his slam on Flash, Steve Jobs argued that most video on the web was already in an iDevice-ready format: H.264. Well, encoding.com’s figures show that, in the last year, FLV and H.264 video have changed position: H.264 up from 31% a year ago to 66% now. FLV & VP6 (Flash 7 onward) combined moved from 69% down to a combined 26% now.

It’s important to note that since Flash 9r3 (Nov 2007) Flash has been able to play MP4 H.264 video – the same as is played on the Apple portable devices: Flash is not required to view these videos.

When Adobe announced H.264 support in Flash I wrote this for the Digital Production BuZZ news feed:

This is a seriously good development in web delivery and establishes H.264/AAC in an MPEG-4 (mp4/m4v) wrapper as the dominant web format. Gone is the need to encode separate versions for Flash and MPEG-4. Now you you can load and play .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov (limited support) and .3gp files into a Flash player using the same API used to load FLV files now. The same files will now play in Flash, QuickTime Player, iPod, Apple TV and many other players.

And so it has come to pass!


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “Looks like Jobs was right. H.264 makes up 66% of web video”

  1. Hi Phillip,

    Thanks for sharing this information, as always.
    I read quite a few posts about this flash fight.
    Just by seeing the WSJ interview with Adobe CEO, he seems to be employing evasive maneuvers on many questions, recycling answers and repeating himself, along with “i don’t know quite what i am talking about” body language.
    No wonder he is wrong about most of it. H.264 seems to be the codec of choice.
    Flash had a nice respectable run.
    Next…. [pun intended]