Multimedia Tip: using H.264 video's in flash player
This may be ancient news to multimedia professionals, but we still need to inform customers about this on a regular basis. So, once and for all: Adobe Flash Player supports H.264 video and has been doing so since December 2007 (version 9, update 3).
Like Adobe, we recommend transcoding your files to mp4 video (H.264 video / AAC audio) instead of using Sorenson Spark (used by RATS for flv transcoding) or the On2VP6 codec. When transcoding with the same bitrate, the H.264 codec delivers much higher quality. You can test it yourself: go to the Control Panel 'Transcode your media' section and try transcoding the same source file to both mp4 and flv using the same quality settings. You will notice that the bitrate of the flv file will be much higher.
Version 9 (or higher) of the Flash Player plugin currently has a market penetration of almost 99%. If you still want to serve the remaining 1 %, consider transcoding to both mp4 and flv, and doing a client-side plugin version check that determines which format to offer.
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