Yesterday I got the news about nicovideo supporting H.264 streams on their site.

Btw, for those who haven’t heard of nicovideo, it’s a kind of japan’s youtube site. The overall quality of their video is superior than any video host you can find today. They also have the unique commenting system where the comments scroll as you watch the video. Details on registering can be seen here.

Here’s a sample, a video of idolm@ster AMV with the song Electro World (by Perfume) in H.264 quality:
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2539712
I can’t embed it in wordpress, sorry. You need to follow the link to watch.

The quality is very good. It plays offline smoothly using MPC while the previous VP6 fails to play using the newest stable ffdshow.
The only downsides are:

• Huge files. The video above weighs 26.927KB for a 04:22 video. It means roughly it needs 103KB/s (or 1Mbps) connection to stream smoothly.
• Embedded player lacks post-processing filters. The video turns grainy when you resize it beyond its normal resolution (at least that’s what happened to me in my firefox 2 with flash v9)

Those who are following IT news should also know that youtube are also testing their HQ streaming (by adding &smf=6 at the end of youtube URL, only some videos supported).

This sucky wp’s embed limitation makes me think again to set up a custom host or moving out to blogger.com.