After the enormous success of the original Flash, Macromedia unleashes Flash MX, and perhaps a new paradigm for web video.
If you've encoded video for the Web, there's a good chance you've been frustrated by the plethora of formats and data rates that you need to support in order to reach the widest number of viewers.
So what if you could use a format with 98% compatibility among Internet-capable computers? If only it were so easy. What if you could add interactivity to the video stream, make it non-rectangular, and build webpages around it with user navigation to individual frames, or with the video triggering other action? And what if that wasn't going to take years for some standards body politic to sort out licensing fees while the technology waned in relevance?
That's right, this is not about MPEG-4. It's about Macromedia's Flash, the most popular rich media format on the Net. And it's about how the new version of Flash — Flash MX — integrates video directly into the file format. The development application has a built-in encoder and the new player has the decompresser. What's more, that Flash player, and thus the new Flash video codec, is bundled with both Windows and Mac operating systems and Netscape and IE browsers, making its video accessible to much of the browsing world.
Of course, you probably shouldn't throw away your Anystream Agility, Telestream FlipFactory, or Discreet Cleaner Central just yet. Flash MX isn't likely to eliminate multiple encodes altogether, especially for longer, linear streamed videos. But if only by its inheritance, Flash MX is a serious player in web video, literally and figuratively. There's a fourth web video format now and that could be a very good thing.
Powerful and popular
Macromedia's Flash “web animation” format is already used in a majority of rich media websites. Of course, other web video formats can claim similar successes, but in terms of actual use volume, Flash is in a different league.
According to Macromedia, there are 1.3 million users who can minimally move circles and triangles across a browser window by placing objects on a Flash project's time-line. However, most Flash users — especially talented ones — can do much more, including building entire websites using Flash's interactive and/or timed, low-bandwidth control of shapes, text, audio, images, and scripts. With Flash MX, that user base and presumably a new collection of video pros will have a straightforward yet powerful way to integrate video.
Of course, supporting video means different things to different users, especially video professionals and generic computer vendors. For example, PowerPoint “supports” video by allowing presenters to import videoclips into slides and play them on cue. Flash has been able to do that for some time, too, by adding a RealVideo, WindowsMedia, QuickTime, or other format video file that will play linearly inside a window. That functionality doesn't go away in the new version.
However, Flash MX has a native video format built into the swf file format, thus adding video and videoclips to the native design palette of Flash programmers. Macromedia has partnered with Sorenson, long-time Apple partner and maker of the QuickTime compression format, to give Flash users an almost painless way to encode and add video to Flash files. Importing a video (any file type the OS can open) into a Flash project opens a compression dialogue box for encoding into Sorenson's new Spark compression format.
Native encoding parameters are rudimentary. There are just three inexact sliders in the dialogue box for adjusting images: one for quality, one to set a keyframe interval, and a scaling slider that can reduce the frame down to 1% of the original size. Thankfully, video pros will have more options with a standalone pro version of Spark. It will be available (at least initially) directly from Sorenson, and will add bit-rate control, filtering, and color enhancement options.
With both applications still in beta at this writing, quality comparisons have yet to be made between Spark and the current generation of video codecs or formats. However, technology rarely goes backward. For the upside where bandwidth constraints aren't an issue, Sorenson claims the Spark codec will scale up to bit-rates of 1Mbps to 1.5Mbps, matching the sweet spot for MPEG-1 and presumably at least that quality.
What's so flashy?
Still, with video integrated into Flash, peak video quality isn't the main draw. Far more important are the opportunities for using and viewing video on the Web. Currently, web video is essentially a poor quality approximation of watching television. It means video in a rectangle window, played from start to finish.
With Flash MX, at the minimum we see a straightforward way to add user navigation — buttons for play, pause, go to, etc. — but also much more. Flash files can be linear, but also responsive, interactive, and multi-directional. Video can be programmed to react to user input such as changing angles, speed, size, or storyline. Flash files can play different videos depending on previous user activity, such as mouse clicks or visited URLs.
A lot of that functionality might sound familiar. A few video editing companies have added html markers and events to project timelines. Yet with Flash MX, video need no longer carry the weight of the fickle web-surfer's interest on its shoulders. With RealVideo, Windows Media, and to a lesser strictness QuickTime, video opens in a window and plays in the familiar paradigm.
In Flash MX, thanks to layering, video can play in a window, a circle, a square, or even as a background. Videos can stop and start; launch at specified frames; cause other onscreen events such as URL flips and text and image changes; have hot spots; or have any of the other functionalities of Flash. By freeing web developers from the rigidity of playing video in a window and needing to have video be the main focus of a site, Flash should ultimately offer more options for using video on the Web.
Media 100 always acknowledged that a video editing application wasn't the ideal tool to author web-pages, even if they were to include video. By giving web developers the tools to integrate video, rather than giving video editors a way to add html, Flash can open a lot more doors — and windows — for video content.
It won't all happen in a flash
While it's easy to get excited about Flash MX's possibilities, it isn't the answer to all web video problems, and all those other formats aren't going to fade into irrelevancy just yet. The first version of Flash MX, for example, is not a true streaming format, but a progressive download, or pseudo-streaming, format. (Although Macromedia has announced that functionality will arrive later this year with a new version of the Cold Fusion MX server.) This makes it awkward for long linear video segments.
Furthermore, Flash MX does not include native technology for sensing web congestion and reducing bit-rates for a more consistent user experience, as with RealVideo's Sure Stream. This makes it less robust for the disparity between modem and broadband users.
The proprietary Sorenson codec is a bit of a double-edged sword, as well. On one hand, Macromedia needs to keep the Flash player small enough to be bundled with browsers, OSs, PDAs, etc. Adding different video decoders goes against that goal. But it would nice if Flash could offer all of its interactive functionality to a broad range of video formats and file types. It's arguably less useful since it can't, especially if Sorenson's codec forces quality compromises.
Most importantly and regrettably for we impatient video enthusiasts, it's not entirely true that 98% of web viewers will be able to watch Flash videos — at least not immediately. To play the videos, users will need the new Flash player, and as of today, none of those 98% has it.
Fortunately for many users, upgrades are a pretty normal process. For Windows IE users, a dialogue box will open if an older player tries to view Flash MX content. If the user agrees to upgrade, Windows will handle the operation and the video content will play after a short delay. For other users, a prompt will take them to Macromedia's website, where they can download and install the new player. Anyone downloading a new browser version will receive the player, and new Windows and Mac computers will have it installed.
In the big picture, those are modest caveats. Flash's current installed base and new video functionality are more compelling for future web video. In a way, video in Flash isn't so different from the early days of affordable video capture cards and software editing systems going into the hands of both talented and not-so-talented videomakers. By giving 1.3 million Flash developers an easy way to encode and distribute video, the Web is sure to see plenty of bad videos. But by giving talented artists an easy way to create and distribute their ideas, we're sure to see some excellent video work as well.
