Solution for MP4’s desktop licensing & Android preview soon

The release of the Android HW encoder preview is almost ready (whats basically left is implementing  FW logo rendering in the demo version). Included in FlashyWrappers 2.3 will be also slightly updated iOS ANE. With that being said, here are some more details about what to expect and whats missing in the first “real” Android version.

Significantly increased speed – of course the biggest advantage of the new Android version is a major speed increase, which should allow realtime recording of AIR content in high resolution (webcam, games and so on). The tablet being used for all development tests has the following specs:

ASUS K01A – Intel Atom Z2520, CPU: 2×1,2 GHz, GPU: PowerVR SGX544MP2,

You can get one for < $100. In general, when not recording the fps stays at  constant 60fps, when recording 1024×768 @20 fps video from AIR, the apps fps fluctuates anywhere between 30-45, which leaves comfortable room to record 20fps videos. There is still room for improving the fps and it should get better in the future releases.

MP4 file output – by utilizing the device encoders you’ll get mp4 output natively, no ogv’s. This will alow saving to gallery later on(not yet implemented), or simply replaying the video on the phone, which was not possible with the ogv. There are no mp4 licensing issues (similar to iOS) thanks to using the device encoders.

NO audio support yet – the audio will be implemented in the next release. This release shouldn’t be used in production anyway – we’re curious on which devices the ANE “explodes”, as the video / GLES part is probably the most sensitive and device dependent part.

The release is probably 1-2 weeks away, depending on when the new FlashyWrappers website can be up and running.

And finally, what was that about desktop MP4’s? 

As you probably know, the whole MP4 business on desktop is one big mess currently, when it comes to licensing. Dealing wtih H.264 and AAC licensing +  OpenH264 isn’t exactly saving the day as that’s a partial solution just for the video (and it has its own gotchas). In Flash Player, that’s how it will stay for the time being unfortunately.

However, on AIR Mac and AIR Windows, change is coming. When using  encoders of the host operating system (OS X and Windows), the licensing is not an issue because similar to iOS and now Android, FlashyWrappers is utilizing the OS encoders, which are being licensed by Apple or Microsoft, not you.

On OS X the new Mac encoder is coming sooner than you think, as it’s quite simple to port the iOS encoder and utilize OS X AVFoundation H.264 and AAC encoders. In fact, we have a working Mac version right now and we’re testing it 🙂

Windows will need to be implemented from scratch, so the ETA on that is not known yet. Adding Windows platform and getting rid of ffmpeg in general will mean more overhead unfortunately, but we feel that getting rid of the licensing block is one of the most important thing we must do for FlashyWrappers to be really useful. And useful very much means supporting the most popular video format today (mp4), on all platforms with no strings attached (especially no licensing strings). Well, on all platforms except Flash. There’s no solution in sight there unless Adobe opens up their embedded H264 & AAC Flash encoder to developers. Because again, Adobe has licensed those encoders.

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