H264 Support (or lack thereof)

I’ve been looking at adding H264 support over the past few nights however things don’t look good. First there’s some good news; the version of Flash the PS3 now runs is “PS3 9.0.124.0″, which despite the timely release of Flash 10, is only 6 months behind the PC version (the PC’s version 9.0.124 hit the web in April.) The minimum required version for H264 support is 9.0.115.0 so theoretically the iPlayer’s high-quality streams should be playable on the PS3.

Now for the bad news – it doesn’t seem to work. It exhibits the same behaviour as if you try viewing the H264 streams using a version of Flash prior to 9.0.115.0, i.e it connects successfully to the RTMP server, buffers, then stops, displaying nothing but a black screen. This suggests it is either completely incapable of decoding H264 streams (which would be an odd omission considering MP4 is the mainstay of the PS3’s video support) or that there’s something in the stream that it doesn’t like.

So I’m afraid it’s VP6 for now.

P.S. If anyone in the know happens to come across this post and feels like saving me a lot of time poking around trying to get it to work, it’d be great of you could leave a comment or contact me directly regarding the status of Flash H264 support on the PS3.