F4V is Retarded
Posted by Brooks in AIR, Flash, Flex, video on Dec 7th, 2008 | 10 commentsWhy F4V is the wrong decision:
- Destroys one of the great promises of MPEG4-AVC / h.264–interoperability.
- No single file deployment (closely tied to interoperability). I certainly imagine a world where a single piece of media can be posted on the web, downloaded and played back through Flash Player, iPhone / iPod, QuickTime, Apple TV, etc. Gone should be the days of providing different files for different browsers, plugins or mobile devices.
- Effectively reduces the usefulness the existing MPEG4-AVC / h.264 ecosystem. The MPEG4 spec urges .mp4 be used as the file extension and many vendors just refuse to work with something that has a different file extension.
- You lose out on much of the existing intelligent rss enclosure handling. Blogging platforms and plugins will recognize the .mp4 extension and auto-generate enclosures (very useful for delivering to feed readers and mobile devices).
- F4V just muddles the codec picture even more. Take a look at any of the encoder dialogs in CS4 and you’ll see a confusing slew of options (flv, f4v, h.264, h.264 blu-ray, etc.). Hell, I even heard an instructor in one of the MAX hands on sessions, urge students to steer clear of h.264 encodings since that was just HD / blu-ray stuff. He actually was pushing flv (pretty bizarre for an AfterEffects class).
I’m not trying to be a jerk, there are definite reasons Adobe may have chosen to use F4V:
- Apple did it (M4V). Yep, Apple screwed the pooch as well.
- It’s easy to associate file extensions with default application handlers (i.e. AMP is the default media player for *.flv and *.f4v files).
- Allows for a unique mime-type (Flash Player gets associated with a specific file type on servers).
- OS file choosers allow filtering by extension.
- F4V clearly establishes a file as compatible with the parts of the MPEG4 spec supported by Flash Player. This has the obvious advantage of visual associations / assumptions and might assist descriptions in documentation and marketing.
I guess I feel like there should be some sort of primary directive: “thou shalt not damage interoperability.” Any time you’re thinking of messing with the spec it should be examined through this lens. As valid as some of the reasoning for using F4V is, it fails, IMHO, when compared to the primary directive.
10 Responses to “ “F4V is Retarded”
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I think they needed this option in order to provide the option of embedding cue points and other rmi calls within the file.
One problem with QuickTime: If you do H.264 encoding using x264 with advanced settings (for instance something like 4 reference and 4 b-frames which is useful for Anime or other stuff like lossless) you’ll notice that QuickTime likes to crash when playing these files. QuickTime has very limited support for H.264. I can’t remember when I last encoded a file which didn’t make it crash. Watch some of the feedback on doom9.org about this, it’s entertaining.
I suggest to use VLC if you need quick access to with & height. It’s a much better video player anyway and it does not care about file extensions.
Apple did the same with m4v that opens with itunes.
You already are in the “Adobe ecosystem” when you encoded it from Premiere, After Effects, etc into F4V. You can check the dimensions using Bridge.
@Brian – two things: 1) I don’t believe that cue points are supported in the f4v format (yes, the docs make it sound like it, but if you try to insert cue points with the tooling they don’t show up if you go to f4v, and 2) even if cue points worked, changing the extension for the sake of a proprietary event format seems to run counter to the principles of adopting the MPEG4 standard, or portions thereof.
Brooks, although not a perfect analogy, I kinda feel the same way about Jing. I was really disappointed that Jing only outputs a .swf–from which I cannot extract a video file. I have tried every tool I know of. Why can’t Jing output other formats??? I have read the FAQ and blog and the rationalization by Jing for use of SWF.
@Ryan – Yep, Jing is simple to use, easily viewable on almost any platform, but the videos it creates fail the interoperability test. There are several reasons for this that:
Free. No licensing costs.
The desire to make Jing content viewable by everyone, regardless of platform.
Realtime transcoding.
There’s not a lot of video formats out there that meet those criteria.
That said, keep your eye on the Jing project as we enter the new year. I think you’ll be pretty happy with some of the things that are in the works. ;-)
By the way, great post on your blog about the DRM mess and Blu-ray–I share the same frustration. ;-)
Dougal- I’m with you, I was unaware they anyone even used quicktime player to watch anything. Not to mention its gawd awful slow. VLC is really the way to go. I run vlc on windows and nix with no issues and it play’s everything I throw at it. The new adobe media player doesn’t impress me either. Seems unstable on windows anyway.
I agree f4v has some issues but the end result is a sexy small file with great quality that can be played in almost any flash player.
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Thank you for given great post on this topic…