Flash Player to support H.264 video

The third beta version of the Flash Player will support the industry
standard H264 video compression used in BlueRay and HD-DVD players.
This will make web video easier than ever - also for the content
producers.
H.264 is a highly efficient compression codec that aims to solve most
problems with existing video codecs. Often referred to as MPEG4, the
codec is able to scale from mobile phones to HD and beyond. It is a
well documented ISO standard and completely vendor independent. It can
be used for both downloadable or streamed video and it is already in
wide use as the format for digital TV transmissions (DVB-T, ISDB-T DVM
and more). What's so great about this then? The most important will be
the need for video content producers to encode to only one format. The
resulting file can then be played back using the Flash Player,
Quicktime, Windows Media and other video players supporting the codec.

Google / YouTube recently started the conversion of all content to
H.264 making it possible to play all their videos on mobile phones
such as the Apple iPhone and a wide range of other devices. The Flash
Player update also adds some support for the mobile video file format
3gp (based on H.264) and the professional AAC audio codec. This is a
great move from Adobe that will save some headaches with content
providers, but it will also somewhat reduce the Flash Player's
importance in the video field.

The last few years, Flash video has been THE solution since next to
everyone has the Flash Player installed. The drawback of this solution
was that content providers got into a vendor lock-in since the FLV
video files could only be played back using Flash Player. Now, we'll
get a file format that all the major software video players can use.
This makes it easier than ever to change what video player solution
your site uses and ensures access to a huge selection of video
encoding tools (If you use popular tools such as Sorenson Squeeze,
Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, you are already able to encode H264/MPG4
files). Another great advantage is that content providers can now use
dedicated hardware for compressing video, something that will
seriously speed up the encoding process. The new player will be
available on labs.adobe.com this afternoon