On Tuesday, Adobe is shipping the beta of the new Flash "in-browser" player 9, code name Moviestar, with support of the H.264 video codec compression standard, the same used in Blu-ray systems, HD-DVD players and TV set-top boxes, plus High-Efficiency AAC audio encoding, as well as hardware acceleration for full screen playback and multi-core support. The Adobe Media Player as well as the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) formerly known as Apollo, will also support the new audio/video standards. Currently the Flash Player 9 supports two main video codecs: Sorenson and On2 VP6. I talked earlier this week with Adobe's chief strategist for dynamic media, Mark Randall, about the launch.

"H.264 is technically superior. It's also based on an open standard and has enormous industry momentum behind H.264 in terms of adoption. The new player will recognise a native H.264 file, including a QuickTime MOV file. You will just have to rename it. But if you want the Web interactivity experience and DRM support you will then need to have the FLV container around the H.264 file", said Mark Randall (pictured), Adobe's chief strategist for dynamic media.

Why *only* now?

"H.264 is gaining prevalence now. And we are also very careful to target our releases to make sure that the vast majority of computers (PC, Mac and Linux), could take advantage of a new technology we deploy. And if we had deployed this 18 months ago, It may have been a much less number of computers that can take advantage of H.264 which is a technically demanding codec as it takes more processor cycles in order to decompress. But now you have the PC footprint, the content and the body of people who know how to encode this format [using the Creative Suite 3 tools]", added Randall

What is H.264?

H.264 is the next-generation video compression technology in the MPEG-4 standard, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 (ISO/IEC 14496-10). H.264 delivers excellent video quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum — from 3G (Mobile phones) to HD (Broadcast) and everything in between. H.264 is now mandatory for the HD-DVD and Blu-ray specifications (the two formats for high-definition DVDs) and ratified in the latest versions of the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasters) and 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) standards. Numerous broadcast, cable, videoconferencing and consumer electronics companies consider H.264 the video codec of choice for their new products and services, including Apple, Sony, Nokia, SanDisk, Palm, Blackberry and even Microsoft. (source: Adobe)

What is HE-AAC?

AAC is standard audio format defined in the MPEG-4 video standard, and is also the default audio format of the Apple iPod, and the standard audio format for Sony’s PlayStation 3. Flash Player supports HE-AAC v2, an extension of AAC that uses Spectral Band Replication (SBR) and Parametric Stereo (PS) techniques to increase coding efficiency at low bitrates. (source: Adobe)