Creative Cloud Snubs FLV and F4V, But Flash Video Use Continues

今年6月, Adobe发布了2014年版的Creative Cloud, 其中包括更新版本的Premiere, 后的效果, 和媒体编码器. 在这个新版本中, Adobe removed the capability to export the FLV and F4V video formats from these video production tools. While video professionals might interpret this as a death knell for Flash video, this decision does not affect the market for Flash-based video in any real way.

You can -- and should -- still encode video for browser delivery through the Flash Player. Flash-based rendering of video will remain a necessary fact of life until legacy browsers are virtually nonexistent and a viable live streaming format is pervasive across browsers.

FLV和F4V格式, which are containers for video and audio codecs that are not proprietary to Adobe, were specifically engineered for playback in the Adobe Flash Player.

The FLV file format can contain Sorenson Spark (sometimes referred to as H.263)和On2 VP6(与S或E配置文件, as well as 8-bit alpha channel support) for video, 以及MP3或未压缩的PCM音频. 当FLV首次被引入时, most if not all web video and audio codecs were just as “singular” in their playback capability -- WMV files were mainly designed for Windows Media Player, MOV文件的QuickTime播放器, 等等.......

当MP4文件格式和H.264/AAC codecs were added to Flash Player 9’s feature set, Adobe introduced a new file extension, .f4v, for additional data tracks included by Adobe Media Encoder for Flash Player enhancement. These tracks were entirely optional, and for the most part, you could (and still can) replace the .在f4v文件上使用 .mp4扩展. Any MPEG-4 video player, from VLC to QuickTime Player, then more easily recognizes the file.

So why did Adobe remove these formats from export out of its video tools? 根据… Todd Kopriva的Adobe博客文章, the formats were removed “because maintaining these obsolete exporters was a large amount of work” and that the time could be better spent on improving other features. When viewed within the overall scope of video usage on the web, Adobe’s decision was sound -- in 99 percent of online video deployments, AVC / H.264 is a format that most HTML5 browsers and mobile devices can decode. FLV is not a format to continue to use for browser-based video playback.

然而, as a consultant who works on projects with special use cases, I’m well aware of the continued use of the FLV format outside of browsers. Live streaming still largely uses the FLV wrapper over RTMP to publish streams to media servers. 大多数媒体服务器, including Wowza Streaming Engine and Adobe Media Server, can be configured to record incoming streams as either FLV or MP4. (Hint: Publish your stream with a stream name starting with “mp4:” if you’re using Wowza Streaming Engine.)

Another use of the FLV format is transparent video -- the ability to knock out the background behind a subject and “float” the video over other content. This special feature of the On2 VP6 codec and the FLV container still has not been replaced by HTML5 standards. (AVC / H.264规范允许alpha通道, but I have yet to see any encoder or decoder support it.) Web shops producing kiosk displays for video demos are more likely to be affected by Adobe’s decision to remove FLV export. 坦白说，我很高兴还有 Wildform Flix Pro available for FLV export for these types of engagements.

But mentioning another vendor’s product brings me to the larger point: Use the best tool for the job at hand. While it can certainly be helpful to have an “all-in-one” video production suite, 专业人士应该使用专业的工具. Anyone who’s attended my encoding sessions at 流媒体 conferences knows I don’t rank Adobe Media Encoder at the top of the list. 还有更好的H.264 export (and FLV export) tools than those available from Adobe.

Don’t groan over any decision involving Adobe Media Encoder -- if you are, 然后是时候看看其他编码选项了. Encoding with FFmpeg and x264 is by far the best option for H.264输出，但其FLV输出质量较弱. Should you require FLV output, Wildform Flix Pro remains the best tool for the job.

This article appears in the October 2014 issue of 流媒体杂志 如《FLV and F4V:节拍没有你继续."