FLVio video web service now encodes H.264 video
We have just pushed live a new version of the FLVio video web service that gives clients the option to encode (Flash-compatible) H.264 video.

Many people probably already know that Adobe added support for H.264 video (in an mp4 container) to Flash Player late last year. This was welcome news to many people as H.264 is an open standard and provides much higher quality video (at lower bandwidths) than standard "FLV" video.

The only gotcha is that end users need to have a recent version of Flash Player installed (Flash Player 9 Update 3 aka version 9.0.115.0 or newer) to playback H.264 video.

However, many popular Flash media players can be configured to attempt to playback H.264 video within the browser and automatically fallback to the FLV alternative if the version of Flash Player is too old. FLVio has been designed to support this by providing the option to encode both FLV and H.264 videos automatically for the client, providing easy access to the best of both worlds: high quality video playback and backwards compatibility.