[TBA]: Streaming h264 mp4s

[Greg Marra]

Hi all,

The Blue Alliance is thinking about streaming higher quality videos instead of the Flash Video format videos we stream now. These would be h264 encoded mp4s, which are what many of our downloadable videos are right now.

There are a few advantages to moving towards this format. One is that we'd be able to use the HTML5 <video> tag in some browsers, particularly enabling playback on iPhone and Android OS mobile devices. This also will save us some disk space, and give you a better viewing experience in your browser.

The only potential downside is that it will take longer to buffer a 20-30mb video than a 7mb video, but based on our Google Analytics data it appears that this will not be an issue for nearly all of our users. We're going to do some experiments before we fully switch over to this.

Here's the catch: I can't get the Flash Video Player we use (JW FLV Player: http://www.longtailvideo.com/) to play h264 videos. It's supposed to according to its documentation, but I gave it an afternoon and couldn't get it to work. If someone can get a working sample together, I'll be able to roll it out on TBA.

Can anyone lend us some technical assistance?

Thanks!
-Greg