Is This War of H.264 vs Flash?

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash seems to be bringing up a little misleading topic “H.264 vs FLV (or Flash)” to non-multimedia people including tech-savvy. Well, more precisely, at least it introduced “gobbledygook” to us, living in the mobile and upcoming HTML5 era. Erick Schonfeld included a brief explanation about jargons -- containers and codecs -- in his article. However, I’ve read some articles that confuse readers with their misleading titles or summaries of the debate between Apple and Adobe, which sound like Apple has adopted all open standards and advanced technology – here HTML5 and H.264 -- and Adobe hasn’t. The below graphs are the Google Trends results of H.264 and Flash.

Interestingly, we can observe an outburst of searching H.264 on 29th April but no previous news reference volume as opposed to steady search behavior on Flash but an outburst of news reference on 29th April. We all know about Flash these days. But, H.264 is relatively new to non-multimedia people. Surely, it’s an effect of the press release of Steve Jobs’ notes.

What the heck of H.264? H.264, FLV, and Flash are all different kinds. Not comparable. H.264 is a codec used for encoding video whereas FLV is a container, generally just called “format” when we talk about multimedia files, which literally contain metadata and data encoded by codecs. Flash is a multimedia platform used to create or play multimedia data that is contained in the FLV file format. Although it’s true that FLV was once the only container supported by Flash, Flash added support for MP4 container that wraps H.264 encoded data.

HTML5 provides a new element, <video>, which should be “natively” supported by browsers without platform-specific proprietary plug-ins (decoder), such as QuickTime and Flash. It’s up to browsers how they play back multimedia formats. More precisely, it’s rendering (layout) engines equipped in browsers play a role to support multimedia formats (e.g. H.264 in the MP4 container and Theora in the OGG container). So, yes, ideally we don’t need proprietary plug-ins such as Flash to play video in the HTML5 world. However, HTML5 may only shift war of proprietary software companies to a different layer – rendering engine (browsers) and supported multimedia formats. Mike Pilgram, a famous author of Dive into Python, explains well about multimedia codecs and container formats in his new book, Dive into HTML5.

There’s round 2. Because decoding multimedia involves considerably expensive computation, it can be more efficiently done in hardware than in software especially for mobile devices with limited computing resources. Thus, mobile devices are better off by employing hardware decoder or at least hardware acceleration via software, just like the way a dedicated microprocessor can boost encryption in mobile devices. No argument here that Flash suffers from poor performance on mobile devices although Adobe has recently introduced Flash Lite, the light-weight version of Flash, as well as support for hardware acceration in Flash 10.1.

Steve Jobs start with “[Adobe] say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues”. And, he did explain well enough to non-techsavvy why Flash is banned from Apple’s products in technology aspect. And, it is entertaining. However, in reality, it’s based on mixed issues between technology and business. Apple has done good jobs on creating business models and better jobs on protecting their products. I’m not on either side of Apple or Adobe. What I don’t like is the misuse of H.264 as marketing and media hype as open standards or next generation technology adopted by Apple (but not Adobe). Here’s also a summary of interesting FSF’s response to Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash.