Tuesday, 21 August 2007

Adobe Adds H.264 To Support HD Video

Adobe Systems has added H264 support for a video compression standard to bring high-definition video to Flash-based streaming content.

Adobe will announce the release of a beta version of its Flash Player, now known as Moviestar that will add support for H.264, the video compression portion of the MPEG 4 standard.

Mark Randall, chief strategist for dynamic media at Adobe said the updated Flash Player also will be able to take advantage of hardware acceleration in most PCs' graphics cards. The standard is optimised for dual-core processors. It will support HE-AAC version 2, a more efficient audio compression standard that is also part of MPEG 4.

The new features will be made available in the fall as part of an update to Flash Player 9.

What this means to a user is that web video contents will be better in looks and will be in high definition format. Flash is a de facto standard for streaming video used by YouTube and other high-volume Web sites.