New Adobe Flash Player 9 Will Bring HD Video To YouTube
Adobe has announced a new version of its ubiquitous Flash media player with support for H.264 video, the compression component of MPEG 4 which is also found in HD media like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Along with the H.264 support, Flash Player 9 will also support High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC), which Adobe claims allows audio tracks to be encoded at lower bit rate without sacrificing quality.
With Flash already the de facto standard for online video — it powers YouTube and other video sharing sites — the addition of H.264 support could make finally make high-resolution web video a reality. The Flash Player 9 update now supports up to 1080p HD video content encoded with either On2 or H.264. But even more interesting, the update adds support for standard MPEG-4 container files, which means video producers can deliver hardware-accelerated 1080p Quicktime videos within the Flash Player.
The new Flash Player 9, dubbed Moviestar, will also take advantage of hardware acceleration in graphics cards and dual-core processors for improved performance — particularly in fullscreen playback.
The new version of Adobe Flash Player 9 is available for download through Adobe Labs, though the current release is still a beta. The final version is expected to arrive “later in the fall,” according to Adobe.
Since Moviestar will be integrated into other Adobe other products like AIR (and apps built with AIR) and the upcoming Adobe Media Player, there’s a good chance we’ll soon see H.264 video flooding the market. Apple’s Quicktime media player also supports H.264 encoding.
With H.264 encoding already available in Adobe’s desktop video editing software — Premiere Pro and After Effects — the company is clearly hoping to deliver video creators with a complete workflow, from camera all the way to the web. John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, writes in a press release that Adobe wants to “allow creatives and developers to produce video and rich-media once, and then deploy that content across the widest array of distribution and playback environments.”
With Apple’s new iMovie ‘08 frustrating many long-time video users who see the new version as a significant step backwards, Adobe could be poised to grab some people in the burgeoning “prosumer” video production market.
For the rest of us, who content ourselves with being video consumers, the addition of H.264 to Flash Player 9, means that soon YouTube videos might not look so bad on that HD TV after all.
