{"id":16294,"date":"2010-03-30T14:10:40","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T21:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2010\/03\/h-264-isnt-an-alternative-to-flash.html"},"modified":"2010-03-30T14:10:40","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T21:10:40","slug":"h264_isnt_an_alternative_to_flash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/30\/h264_isnt_an_alternative_to_flash\/","title":{"rendered":"H.264 isn\u2019t an alternative to Flash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you think they were competing formats? If not, congrats: you’re better informed than most. Seems like a lot of people are confused, or at least are kind of careless with their phrasing.
\nIn common usage, “H.264” refers to a video format<\/strong><\/a>, and “Flash” refers to a video player<\/strong>. Flash Player displays H.264-encoded video, as do other players (QuickTime, and now the Safari and Chrome Web browsers reading HTML5 video tags<\/a>–with Internet Explorer to follow).
\nThis all gets muddied, however.
\nDaring Fireball noted the other day<\/a>, “TED Goes H.264: Chris Anderson announces a non-Flash version of TED.com for iPhone OS.” Seeing a statement like that, you might think that the TED site has switched file formats<\/em>, from Flash video to H.264.
\nI haven’t talked to the TED folks, but I’d be surprised if they weren’t using H.264 already, displaying it in browser via the Flash Player. The news here, such as it is, is that they’re using an alternate player on a device where Flash Player isn’t allowed to run.
\nThat makes perfect sense, of course. If you’re creating content, you probably have no ideological allegiance to formats or players. You don’t care much whether video is, say, H.264 or VC-1 or PDQ-One-Niner, nor do you care whether the player is Flash or QuickTime or anything else. Rather, you care about results<\/strong>. Most particularly, can your audience see it?<\/em> Once that’s taken care of, does the presentation meet your needs (e.g. interactivity, integration, content protection, stats measurement, etc.)? And from there, do you have effective tools for creating the content? And so on.
\nTED.com<\/a> uses Flash Player to display videos because that lets them reach 98% of browsers<\/a>. If they chose to display the same video via HTML5 markup, they’d reach ~10% of browsers<\/a> (Safari + Chrome). On the iPhone\/iPad, because they’re not able use Flash Player, they’re using an alternate player.
\nSo:<\/p>\n