Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced that the latest update for Adobe Flash Player 9 software, code-named Moviestar, includes H.264 standard video support - the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players - and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support, as well as hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback. These are very significant developments that will extend Flash video's position in web video by enabling the delivery of HD television quality and premium audio content through the ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player and paves the way to expand rich media Flash experiences on the desktop and H.264 ready consumer devices. The latest update for Adobe Flash Player 9 will be available in beta for immediate download later today.

This is a seriously good development in web delivery and establishes H.264/AAC in an MPEG-4 (mp4/m4v) wrapper as the dominant web format. Gone is the need to encode separate versions for Flash and MPEG-4. Now you you can load and play .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov (limited support) and .3gp files into a Flash player using the same API used to load FLV files now. The same files will now play in Flash, QuickTime Player, iPod, Apple TV and many other players.

Web authorers can take advantage of the easy embed features of Flash video, without compromising video quality. The one file on a server can play into any SWF player embedded on a website, including skinned players, and also be downloadable into a podcast feed via iTunes or other aggregator.

Another advantage is that H.264 is getting wide-ranging hardware playback support, something that hasn't been happening for On2's VP6 codec (the actual codec that powers Flash 8 video). Hardware playback means lower CPU loads as the decoding happens on the GPU, which also handles scaling.

With H.264 encoding already available in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects software, H.264 playback is now enabled in Adobe Flash Player, and will be supported by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and applications developed with Adobe AIR software, including Adobe Media Player, which is built using AIR. Content developers can reduce the cost of encoding and preparing data for distribution with H.264 and HE-AAC support in Adobe Flash Player, since these standards are already integrated into their existing authoring workflows. In addition, Adobe is working with an ecosystem of video encoding partners to expand rich media Flash experiences that already support these standards.

The final release is expected to be available via update in the fall. Demonstrations of Adobe Flash Media Server and Adobe Flash Media Encoder supporting the new codecs will be held during the IBC 2007 at the RAI Exhibition and Congress Center in Amsterdam, September 7 - 11 (Stand 7.721) and again at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago, which begins September 30th.