It's been in the pipeline for a while, and some people said it was inevitable, but ADOBE has announced it's integration of the H.264 video codec in it's Flash player and encoder. H.264 has been around for a couple of years, most commonly known as the base codec from which Quicktime 7 (and the more recent MP4's) are based. It's a cracking watch, as anyone who watches Apples trailers will know, as it allows for 480, 720p and 1080i encoding, the same basic quality as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
The Flash player sits on 98% of computers, which would have something to do with the amount of video websites utilising the software, such as YouTube and Dailymotion. It's a big step in the right direction in bringing TV quality video to the small screen on-line, and will further provoke broadcasters to consider the web along with TV/Film at the same time, instead of as a second thought.
The Hi-Def codec will be made available as part of their upgrade to Flash Video 9 this autumn.
Microsoft have meanwhile been busying themselves with Silverlight, a Hi-Def video codec based around Windows Media 9 called VC-1 and they've already got numerous websites signed up such as MLB.com.
Thanks to NY Times and CNET.
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