Results tagged “RTMP” from 6,000 RPM's

As of late, HTML5 has been receiving a tremendous amount of well-deserved positive press. The specification attempts to update the aging HTML4 and XHTML specs with some welcome additions including vector graphics, animation, MathML, and built-in video capabilities.

Also recently, Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc, has made it very clear that Apple wants nothing to do with Adobe Flash calling Adobe "lazy" and Flash "buggy". These seem to be the only two reasons given thus far for not supporting Flash on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. At the same time, Mr. Jobs is pushing the HTML5 agenda as a replacement for Flash even though the spec is far from being complete.

There are several technical and political decisions to be made concerning the HTML5 spec, among these the choice of video codec(s) to support. In one corner you have H.264 (MPEG-4/AVC), an industry standard which is supported by nearly every device from mobile phones, iPods, and browser plugins including QuickTime, Silverlight and Flash. In the other corner, Ogg Theora, an open source alternative which is unsupported on most devices and is based on the ancient On2 VP3 codec. But it's free from licensing fees.

Content producers should be actively engaged in this debate. From purely a workflow standpoint, HTML5 could alter how assets are encoded. If Ogg Theora is chosen the amount of time required to render yet another file, distribute it, and figure out a way to intelligently stream it is not a simple task. And if H.264 is chosen, nothing really changes. The MP4 files you're already encoding for QuickTime, Silverlight or Flash will continue to work. The worst thing that could happen however, is if this piece of the HTML5 spec is left unfinished and no recommendation is made, leaving browser vendors and content producers open to interpret the spec differently.

Websites use Flash for varying reasons; some for animation, some for interactivity and some for content delivery. HTML5 will eventually replace Flash for simple tasks once the spec is complete and tools are created to assist with authoring. What HTML5 will never do is replace Flash (or Silverlight for that matter) in content delivery.

The ability to deliver content reliably and in a timely manner is not something the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol was designed to do. It was designed to transfer hypertext, or HTML. To ensure a more robust streaming experience, other protocols were devised, namely Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, supported by QuickTime and Silverlight) and Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP, supported by Flash). These protocols have a few things in common. They provide real-time streams of audio and video, can support live streaming events, allows a user to jump to an exact point in time in the video (not just the nearest keyframe), will gracefully alter the quality of the content based on the bandwidth available, and can support Digital Rights Management (DRM). Additionally, Flash offers the ability to capture the local webcam and microphone and stream it to the server for archiving and/or redistribution.

HTML5 does not address any of these things. Now, if you're a large video sharing site like YouTube with millions of 1-5 minute community-generated clips, having a quality viewing experience at all bitrates while supporting millions of concurrent live streams, and protecting the producers content during the delivery process is simply not required. In fact, the basic HTML5 video capabilities are probably good enough. However, if your business model is to make money from the content on your site though subscription services, or simply want the best user experience possible, then Flash (or Silverlight), not HTML5, is the best choice. Sites like Hulu that use RTMP in the Flash platform could not offer the kind of experience they do today by using HTML5 exclusively. It's simply not possible.

So for the Flash-haters and those blinded by the HTML5 hype, go back to the 1990's Internet and experience how bad content delivery can be without the support of streaming protocols.

All of this makes me wonder... Mr. Jobs, after the sell of Pixar to Disney, has more shares of Disney than any other individual and is a member of Disney's board of directors.  Wouldn't Jobs want Disney's content to be delivered in the best possible way while simultaneously protecting it and making it easily accessible through any web browser? A reasonable and responsible answer would be 'yes'. But Mr. Job's recent actions and statements contradict this in favor of the expectations of yesterdays technology.

In a recent press release, Adobe announced that it would publish the specification for it's Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). The protocol is used to transfer messages between Flash servers and the Flash Player for Rich Internet Applications and high-performance streaming audio and video.

The proprietary protocol has never been published. As a result, third party's have been left to reverse engineer the protocol in an effort to develop alternative yet compatibile solutions to Adobe's own line of Flash Media Servers.

Vendors like Wowza and the open-source project Red5 will benefit greatly from this announcement. I predict that there will also be a slew of alternatives to these as well as a few specialized implementations of the spec.

The announcement comes at an interesting time. Adobe's recent partnership with Intel to bring Flash-based streaming video to the living room means that they need full community support behind Flash and it's messaging technology, RTMP. It also means theres plenty of opportunity to create all kinds of new services that weren't easily achievable because of high server software costs.

On Monday, Adobe together with MainConcept announced details on an update to Adobe's Flash Player which will include support for H.264 (aka MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Codec, AVC). Tinic Uro, a Adobe engineer, provides details on his blog. Why is this important and how will this effect users? H.264 one of three video standards that are supported in HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disk. MPEG-2 and VC-1 are the other two standards. H.264 provides the same picture quality as MPEG-2 at less than half the bitrate. Moreover, because of it's scalable design, H.264 content is playable on anything from the smallest portable devices to the largest high-definition screens. The first major commercial media player to support H.264 was Apple's QuickTime Player. Content on the iTunes Store, and Apple's movie trailers are all encoded using H.264. The codec is supported by a number of devices including iPod, iPhone, Sony Playstation Portable and several mobile phones. Until now however, playback on a PC was limited to QuickTime and a number of lesser known players like VLC. The inclusion of H.264 into the latest Flash players due later this year is significant because it will suddenly improve a users overall video experience on sites such as YouTube which use Flash to deliver video. As a Google company, YouTube has been offering H.264 versions of it's content for several months now. The result will be less bandwidth, greater picture quality and with the inclusion of H.264 into Adobe AIR, a full-blown standalone player capable of squashing the now dominate Windows Media Player is inevitable. The Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is responsible for licensing of all the MPEG technologies including H.264. As an open industry standard, H.264 content should be playable on any number of devices. And this is where Adobe is making a terrible mistake. Most websites, YouTube included, use a technique known as progressive downloading to stream content from the servers to the client. This technique uses HTTP and therefore is quite limited in what types of interactions can take place between the server and client. Content that is progressively streamed must first be downloaded to the client before it can be played. There are techniques that provide pseudo-streaming using HTTP, but still, interaction is limited to the HTTP protocol. Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) was developed in 1998 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to overcome many of the shortcomings of using HTTP for streaming and to provide a open, standards-based way to stream content from a server to a client. The benefits of using RTSP are numerous and include the ability for a client to request a start time of a audio or video file and the ability for the server to monitor the available bandwidth of the client in real time. According to Tinic Uro's blog, Adobe will not be implementing RTSP in it's Flash player. Rather, they will be streaming H.264 (and FLV for that matter) via their own proprietary protocol, RTMP. This is quite unfortunate because even though H.264 is an industry standard, in order to benefit from true streaming technology, you'll have to use Adobe's proprietary Flash Media Server which implements RTMP. This is bad news for everyone. Because RTSP (and RTMP) implements client/server interaction, bandwidth could be drastically reduced. Imagine YouTube, or any other video sharing site, having chapters or sections of a video that could be played without having to start at the beginning or having to wait for the video to progressively download. Imagine being able to click anywhere on a videos timeline and have that video start playing , instantaneously. This is possible with a true streaming solution, but with Flash it will only be possible with Flash Media Server. Vendor lock-in seems to be the game Adobe is willing to play. To me, this is completely outrageous and I implore Adobe to reconsider this decision. I understand that Adobe is a business and must make a profit. But the decision to not support RTSP hurts education, non-profits and small business, most of whom could not afford the high price tag of Flash Media Server in the first place. By contrast, a number of open source RTSP server implementations exist which are free of charge, including Darwin Streaming Server from Apple. If Flash supported RTSP, I believe the Internet would spawn a new generation of video sites, with new functionality and even greater interactivity. Think of a JumpCut, YouTube, Digg and Pownce fusion. This process alone would help Adobe sell users on their AIR and Flex platform because of the increased interactivity. With Adobe's decision, it's unfortunate that innovation in the online video arena will crawl along at it's current rate.