What just happened to video on the web?
3gp timed text tracks. Any number of text tracks are supported and all the information, including esoteric stuff like karaoke meta data is dumped in ‘onMetaData’ and a new ‘onTextData’ NetStream callback. Language information in the individual tracks is also reported. That means you can have sub titles in several languages. Study the 3GPP TS 26.245 specification to see what information is available. Note that you have to take care of the formatting and placement of the text yourself, the Flash Player will do nothing here. Time for you to start working on one of those components which do that. You can use MP4Box to inject text data into existing files.
And you can use my dive into mark show MP4 files for testing your accessible Flash video player. Each video file has an H.264 (main or baseline profile) video track, AAC LC audio track, and a 3gp timed text track for subtitles.
Any takers?
Will this make playing these type of videos in Gnash, or better, media players of the user’s choosing (e.g. Mplayer?) Is proprietary, un-free Flash video finally losing its stranglehold on web video?
Considering how embarrassingly inefficient Flash’s current video decoder is I shudder to think what H.264 high profile will do to my battery life if I have to use them.
Comment by Patrick — Tuesday, August 21, 2007 @ 10:10 pm
mozilla-mplayer plays those aforementioned MP4 files just fine, assuming mplayer is compiled with H.264 and AAC support. totem-mozilla plays them too, with appropriate codecs. I’m not sure what’s involved in “wrapping” the files to make them playable in Flash 9 in the first place; presumably some sort of SWF that loads the MP4 file. I do know that Flash9 doesn’t register itself to handle Content-Type: video/mp4.
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, August 21, 2007 @ 10:54 pm
By “these types of videos” I meant wrapped flash videos. I don’t envision that sites that offer Flash video now will suddenly offer raw H.264 but rather H.264 wrapped in Flash which hopefully will be easy to unwrap, making Flash irrelevant for me.
Comment by Patrick — Wednesday, August 22, 2007 @ 10:12 am
The post itself says that there’s no need to “wrap”. From the first bullet point in the second list:
so any site that wants to avoid doing more work will use mp4 files as-is.
Comment by Bart — Wednesday, August 22, 2007 @ 12:35 pm
Bart, I believe that comment was directed at Web developers. You still need a Flash object in the Web page to play the clip, and as with YouTube and so on there’s no need for the URL of the actual video file to be exposed in any particularly clear way to the user.
To Patrick: I would imagine that the gstreamer gnash backend either already supports this or would require the most trivial of patches to do so, assuming that gstreamer itself already supports the formats.
- Chris
Comment by Chris Cunningham — Friday, August 24, 2007 @ 2:28 pm