Price: $249 $199.20 (plus appl. tax)
Version: 1.0.4
 

MainConcept AAC Encoder is the full version audio codec Plug-In for Adobe Flash Media Encoder 2.5. It offers high-quality AAC audio encoding as perfect companion to your high-quality video streaming.

MainConcept AAC Encoder is the latest addition to MainConcept’s successful set of Plug-Ins to enrich Adobe products with state-of-the-art codec solutions. It offers professional AAC Encoding within the Adobe® Flash® Media Encoder 2.5 that only comes with Nellymoser or MP3 audio encoding as standard.

Why not using MP3 only?

AAC is the emerging future audio standard that might replace existing ones, such as MP3. It is already supported by popular devices such as Apple iPod, Sony PSP, Sony PS3, Nintendo Wii, various cell phones etc. Some technical snap-shots:

• AAC and HE-AAC offer a significantly better audio quality while using the same bit rate as other audio codecs, especially for bit rates below 192 kbps.
• AAC may only need a fraction of the bandwidth than MP3 for your field of application (e.g. broadcasting concerts), thus resulting file sizes will be smaller too.
• AAC offers a significantly higher coding as well as compression efficiency and allows you a higher flexibility in usage than MP3.

Most dominantly, saving bandwidth and having smaller file sizes means saving money – especially if you focus on continuous video & audio streaming over scarce resources. Providing better audio quality to your audience and encoding efficiency only add to the advantages of the AAC encoding standard.

AAC was developed to be the successor of MP3. For more technical details on AAC you may refer to comprehensive public documents at Wikipedia.

Adobe Flash Media Encoder 2.5 (FME) already includes the MainConcept H.264 Encoder technology to create professional video streams. Now using the AAC Encoder Plug-In, it additionally supports AAC (MPEG-4 AAC & HE Audio), enabling you to directly create and stream Flash compliant F4V or FLV files that include both H.264/AVC video and AAC audio. It is the perfect companion for FME, as it enables you to generate Flash compliant streams using these encoders on-the-fly. And your files are always compliant with the latest Flash Player version.

Availability

The MainConcept AAC Encoder Plug-In is designed to work on any PC which meets the Adobe Flash Media Encoder 2.5 minimum system requirements and can only be used when Adobe Flash Media Encoder 2.5 is installed.

The free demo version of the MainConcept AAC Encoder Plug-In for the Flash Media Encoder 2.5 comes with an audio limitation of 30 seconds (required by licensor of the AAC standard) – the encoding process for both audio and video will stop after this period of time.