Adobe Flash Player

in Multimedia

The Adobe Flash player is a free web browser plug in that is distributed by Macromedia, now a division of Adobe products.  Flash was introduced in 1996 by Macromedia as a follow up to their extremely popular shockwave movie player. Unlike shockwave, flash was built from the ground up to be used to play and create movies and animations specifically designed to be run in web browsers on web pages. The movie creation application is also called Flash. You use the Flash program to create the movie and the Flash player to watch it.Flash stores it files in a vector based format which means it describes each images as a series of lines and shapes with properties like color and texture. Storing images in this format creates significantly smaller image files which means reduced downloading time before it can be played in the user’s web browser. The early versions of flash were only capable of creating two dimensional animations. However, each new released version has increased the capabilities so that today Flash can create streaming audio and video movies as well as many special effects that make today’s web pages so much more interesting to look at.

At present flash is usually built into newer web browsers. If not already built in, it is available as a free download from the Adobe website.  One of the nicer features is that each new version of the flash player is completely backward compatible so you can play older movie files without any problems.

Supported Platforms

Flash is still a proprietary format and not available for free or shareware licensing. However, the flash player is available for the following operating systems on 32 bit platforms:

The player is also either already available or in development for the most popular 64 bit operating systems platforms. The most recent releases of the flash player support the H264 video and HE-AAC audio formats. Flash uses the proprietary .FLV file format but can be also be embedded in the .SWF file format. Some of the best know users of the flash video format are YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, Yahoo!Video and Reuters.com 

Flash video can be created using Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex as well as other Adobe and third party software programs. Flash comes with a built in programming language called ActionScript which can be used to create completely flash based websites. The biggest downside of the flash player is that it is less efficient running .SWF files when compared to directly running a video file embedded in the web page..

Audio is normally encoded in the MP3 format when used in flash movies. However, the flash player can support ADPCM, HE-AAC, AAC SBR, AAC Main Profile and AAC-LC formats. The latest version released in the  fourth quarter of 2007, supports MPEG-4.

Delivering the video to the end user

Flash Video files can be delivered in several different ways:

  • As a standalone .FLV file that can be stored on a hard disk or burned to a CD. FLV files do not require the flash player.
  • Embedded in an SWF file. The entire file must be downloaded before it can play and you have to completely redo the file to make any changes which means you shouldn’t save your movie in the SWF format until it is the way you want it.
  • Use ActionScript to progressively download the file from a web server while it is already playing inside the browser. However, unlike streaming using RTMP, HTTP “streaming” does not support real-time broadcasting.
  • Streamed using RTMP to the Flash Player using a Flash Media Server.

The Flash Video file format supports two versions of a screen share codec that are bitmap tile based and can be lossy reducing color depths  as a result of the level of compression used.

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