HDTV/3D TV News
The BBC may drop Adobe’s Flash system for its iPlayer streams, in order to improve video quality.
The Flash based streaming service enables iPlayer to work on a larger range of video playing devices. It also enables DRM protected content to work on a non-Microsoft platform.
The BBC has just announced plans to introduce a new iPhone and iPod service, which will require it to transcode its programmes into the MPEG-4-based H.264 standard as well as Flash video format (FLV), which is based on the older H.263 codec.
The H.264 standard is highly-compressed and could support higher quality streams using existing broadband infrastructure.
Adobe Flash has recently been upgraded to support H.264, in what was considered an effort to offset competition from Microsoft’s new Silverlight project.
As well as Flash for the streams, the BBC also uses WMV for the download application version of iPlayer.
The BBC has also developed the open source Dirac codec which could be included in iPlayer.
The BBC is expected to make a final decision on what format to use for the main iPlayer streaming service, later this year. Criteria such as video quality and cost will be taken into consideration.
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