You might have read my post about my FLV meta data and cue point reader/writer. You might also know that the F4V format (which really is simple MP4+H264+AAC) succeeded to the FLV format, and is supported by Flash 9.0.115 and up.
The MP4Info class is a simple extensible PHP class reading the MP4 container’s frames (called boxes) to get various information, namely the video duration, the video/audio codecs, the width and the height, as well as the embedded XMP meta data.
The F4V format is better than the FLV format in many aspects:
- Better compression ratio
- Better quality at similar bit rates
- Open source compressors available, through ffmpeg and libh264 (Flash 8 On2 VP6 codec is proprietary)
- Decoding H.264 is a lot less CPU intensive on the host computer than decoding On2 VP6
With Flash 9 being at a rate of penetration of 98.9% in mature markets1 and will all the advantages, MP4 Flash video is becoming more and more common.
