The prerelease version of Flash Player 9, codenamed “Moviestar,” incorporates the H.264 video standard and High Efficiency AAC audio (HE-AAC) support, as well as “hardware accelerated, multicore enhanced full-screen video playback,” according to a press release issued by Adobe.
H.264 is the same video standard used in Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, and H.264 encoding already is available in both Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects video editing software. The standard soon will be supported by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and applications developed with the AIR software, including Adobe Media Player.
John Loiacono, a senior vice president at Adobe, said that the company is “committed to providing a seamless creation-to-playback solution,” which will provide developers the ability to produce video and rich-media content once, and then distribute that content across the widest range of distribution and playback environments possible.
“Already a broadly adopted industry standard, the inclusion of the H.264 codec in Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, the Creative Suite product line and the upcoming Adobe Media Player will accelerate customer workflows, enabling the creation and repurpose of high-quality web video content without extra development costs,” Loiacono said.
In addition to being supported by a wide range of hand-held video playback devices, Flash Player content reaches more than 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops, according to Adobe. Flash also is the video technology of choice for some of the Internet’s most-visited sites, including YouTube.com and MySpace.com
The prerelease version of Flash Player 9 is available to download for free on the Adobe Labs website.
