H.264 Videos

Brightcove supports uploading and playback of videos in H.264 format. H.264 is a video compression technology in the MPEG-4 standard, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10. Using H.264, you can delivery higher-quality video with less bandwidth than many alternative encodings. As a partial tradeoff, decoding H.264 requires more CPU resources on the client side than VP6 (.flv) videos.

When you upload an H.264 video using the Media module, you have the following options:

• Use your source H.264 as the video for playback, without additional transcoding. (Note however, that your source H.264 may be transcoded, if it is not already encoded with appropriate metadata.)
• Have Brightcove transcode the source H.264 into a single VP6 (.flv) video for playback.
• Have Brightcove transcode the source H.264 into multiple VP6 (.flv) videos for multi-bitrate streaming playback.
• Have Brightcove transcode the source H.264 into multiple H.264 videos for multi-bitrate streaming playback, and optionally retain the source H.264 video as an additional multi-bitrate streaming rendition. This option lets you retain an H.264 master that can be at an even higher level of quality than Brightcove's highest-quality rendition. In addition, when you select this option, your H.264 source video is available immediately, as soon as the upload is complete, and you don't have to wait for the video to be transcoded before it is available in the Media module and in your players.

For more information, see Uploading Videos and Using Multi-Bitrate Streaming.

You can also upload H.264 video files using FTP batch provisioning or the create_video method of the Media API. With either FTP batch provisioning or the Media API, you have the option of having your H.264 video files transcoded by Brightcove into multiple renditions, or you can provide your own H.264 or VP6 renditions for multi-bitrate streaming. You also have the option of retaining your H.264 video file as an additional rendition.

You cannot use H.264 video content with version 2.0 Brightcove players created in the Brightcove Console. You need a player created in ActionScript 3.0, like all of the players created in Brightcove 3 or later.

Required Flash version

H.264 video content requires viewers to have Flash version 9.0.115.0 or later; VP6 videos require Flash version 9.0.28.0 or later. Brightcove players detect the version of Flash that viewers are using. By default, if viewers are using a Flash version earlier than 9.0.28.0, the player prompts them to upgrade. If you are using H.264 video in a player, you should include the minorRevision configuration parameter in your publishing code, so that the player prompts viewers to upgrade to Flash version 9.0.115.0:

For JavaScript publishing code:

<param name="minorRevision" value="115" />

For ActionScript publishing code:

config["minorRevision"] ="115"