Yes, the h.264 Specification is Freely Available

I’ve done quite a bit of research on MPEG4-AVC / h.264 over the last year, but one thing that always seemed to bug me was that I couldn’t seem to find a freely available version of the spec anywhere. I’d hoped to find something on the ISO site, and I did, but it they’re charging for the pdf. Now in my book paying cash to read a spec stinks, seems contrary to the purpose of a standard and, well, just isn’t something I’m going to do, so I just slid by soaking up crumbs where I could find them.

To be fair there’s little chance I’ll actually understand the spec, so crumbs are probably appropriate. Reading level aside, I thought I was SOL until stumbling onto a link to the spec at the ITU-T site. For those who aren’t aware the MPEG4-AVC (ISO) / h.264 (ITU-T) spec was jointly developed by the ITU-T and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The result is the exact same spec with different names (MPEG4 Part 10 / AVC vs. h.264) and, it turns out, completely different policies on whether to charge for the spec.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, I can get back to blankly staring at the spec until sleep or ADD overwhelms me.

Improve Flash MPEG-4 AVC Seeking With Binary Search

Like most video nerds I’ve been working with MPEG-4 AVC (h.264) in Flash Player, but the release of Flash Player 10 has introduced some challenges. For example, there’s a Flash Player bug which causes Internet Explorer 6 / 7 to crash when seeking between the first two indexed keyframes in an MPEG-4 AVC encoded file (see the submitted bug on Jira). That’s a pretty nasty bug and something which wasn’t happening in Flash Player 9.0.115, but like all things there’s a silver lining. I started looking at how I might be able to write my NetStream seeking algorithm so that it eliminated, or at least mitigated the crashing.

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AIRhead: OS Specific Accelerator Key Weirdness

Warning Nerd Post–disregard if you’re not an AIRhead. I’ve been working on a little AIR app and had a helluva time trying to get a NativeMenuItem keyboard shortcut set up for “Save As” functionality. The thing is I wasn’t trying to do anything difficult. I was setting the keyboardEquivalent to lower case “s” and then explicitly setting the keyEquivalentModifiers to COMMAND + SHIFT on OS X or CONTROL + SHIFT on Windows. Things were peachy on OS X, but not so great on Windows (XP is all I tested). On Windows the caps lock must be on (despite the lowercase key equivalent). So after dropping the f-bomb a handful of times, debating whether to gouge my own eyeballs out and tweeting my rage I seriously dug into the documentation looking for an answer.

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Adobe SEO – Where’s The Beef…Err, Video

I’m just curious if flv / h.264 cuePoints / timed-text tracks, captions and other metadata will actually be picked up by the search engines now?

I’m guessing based on “the dance” here that we can’t expect any actual deep linking to automagically appear.

Right now we’re being spoon fed information. What I’m hoping to hear soon are the implementation details. SEO is effective because it can be exploited. People just relying on the search engines to “get it right” often aren’t all that happy–you’ve got to be on the first page. This means, like most things, the devil is in the details.

So you cats at Adobe can read this as the first wave was effective. I’m tuned in–alert and listening. Now feed me more.

Adobe Flash SEO Announcement Leaves Microsoft In The Cold

Ryan and the Adobe team just let the world know that SEO is no longer the elephant in the room when it comes to Flash goodness.

I’m obviously not in the loop and can’t add much, but it was curious that Adobe, by the looks of the announcement, is not collaborating with Microsoft. Google and Yahoo get mentioned like eight times, but no love for the girls in Redmond. I’m just wondering if this is because:

1. Microsoft, as a distant third, in the Search game is irrelevant and not worth the effort to collaborate with.
2. Microsoft, as a distant third, is being collaborated with, but is irrelevant.
3. Microsoft is not interested and is choosing not to offer a service to a direct competitors platform file format.

I mean they’re still giving out bronze medals in the Olympics aren’t they? Curious omission in otherwise good news for those of us living off the platform.

*Update*

If you read the fine print (the actual message from the suits) there’s a vague declaration about wanting to make the technology more broadly available…whatever that means. ;-P