Adobe delivers Flash Player 9 with H.264 video support
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 4, 2007 at 11:48am
Adobe has released Flash Player 9 Update 3 software, previously code named Moviestar. Adobe Flash Player 9 now 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 capabilities.
The latest update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers. The combination of Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash Media Server 3 enables the delivery of HD quality video to the broadest online audience, according to Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect for Adobe. Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3 is
available immediately here.
H.264 support is an encoding option in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects software and is now integrated across the Adobe Flash family of products. Support extends to applications developed for Adobe AIR software, a cross-operating system application runtime that enables developers to use their existing skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.
Expected to be available in early 2008, Adobe Media Player, the first application from Adobe built on Adobe AIR, will leverage both H.264 video and HE-AAC audio support. Adobe Media Player takes Flash streaming video experiences outside the web browser delivering more viewing options, such as watching videos anytime, anywhere.
Adobe Flash Player can be used to view both live and on-demand media or entertainment on sites such as CBS, NBC, FoxNews Digital, PBS, MTV Networks, BBC and Hulu. The technology also powers the video capabilities of social networking sites including YouTube and MySpace. With H.264 and HE-AAC support in Adobe Flash Player 9 and Adobe Flash
Media Server 3, content providers can now deliver HDTV-quality streaming video on the Web, Lynch says.
Since H.264 and HE-AAC are open industry standards and already integrated into existing authoring and publishing workflows, content producers can leverage their existing H.264 material and seamlessly play back the native content in Adobe Flash Player, he adds. This enables publishers to encode content once and then distribute it to multiple mediums.
Adobe Flash Player 9 is immediately available as a free download for Mac, Windows and Linux
platforms.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
