Recently I got a Xacti VPC-HD1000. This is the smallest 1080i video camera on the market, plus 8M picture camera. It stores the video data on a solid state 4gig SD card in AVCHD. AVCHD is another name for H.264. Flash Player 9 revision 3 recently came out supporting H.264/AAC.
This made me consider the fact that files I make on my Xacti would drop directly into flash player9.3 without any conversion or transcoding. The example below show how this DOES WORK. I have even tried 720p. Also worked very well but had a lot of video tareing.
I wanted to point this out as it is an example of what is likely to happen in the future.
I am the producer AND distributor of this content.
As Microsoft any many others are now marketing the “Home Server“. Placing home videos on this server, or transcoded purchased DVD’s is going to be common place.
Simply going to your friend’s place, and typing up your home server IP address and you have the example below.
The file directly out of my Xacti camera is 27.5meg in size. Goes for 5 min. H.264 320×240 30fps AAC audio 48kHz. Copied as is from camera to my server at work. (Limited space on my Blog server)
Get the Flash Player
to see this player.
This is a link to 720p at 30fps content I uploaded to my server in the office. Ie, its not on a terribly fast link. Its about 27meg in size.
Get the Flash Player
to see this player.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Philip Hodgetts // Jan 12, 2008 at 5:14 am
Very cool experiment James.
Philip
2 Paul // May 19, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Awesome
3 Fred Williams // Aug 18, 2008 at 3:55 pm
James, we are trying to use AVCHD video in our program. We presently are using DV-AVI (DV25). You said you do programming and conversions. Are you able to create an AVCHD player we can use in our program and/or a conversion to convert AVCHD to DV-AVI (DV25) files.
If you feel confident in these areas I would like to talk to you further.
Fred Williams
NTM Sports
williams.fred@ntmsports.com
4 Greg // Oct 5, 2008 at 11:12 am
James,
Exactly how do you do this? I have a AVCHD player and would love to setup a web page to play all my AVCHD video clips, but don’t know exactly how to do what you setup above. Please let me know if you have some additional info on setting this up.
thanks.
greg.
5 JamieG // Oct 5, 2008 at 5:08 pm
HI Greg,
Flash 9 movie star and above can all play H.264 in a standard MP4 container..
Flash CS3 was not really designed to know about this, so to make it easy, use the old flv tools, just rename your file.mp4 to file.mp4.flv And it should work. In the above I use a standard FLV player I got on a site. You just load it and point it at a video file with JavaScript.
The only REAL issue you need to take note of is that the video will not progressive-stream if the OP-ATOM header is at the end of the file (Very standard.) This header file, if at the front of the file, tells the flash H.264 player how to handle the file as streaming. Otherwise it has to wait until the file has completely downloaded before it can play.
The big problem most people have is a system says it makes H.264 files, however, they commonly place it in a non-standard container. Pulling it apart and putting it back together is usually possible but its hard and very complex. mp4box and other command line tools can be used.. You have to be brave!!
James
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