Adobe just made an announcement about their new codec support in Flash 9. This is being released to labs tonight and will probably go out in a general update in the very near future. This comes right after one of their key engineers announced multi-core support (aka threads) for the latest version of Flash 9.
If you want the H.264 announcement tech details, go here to Tinic’s blog post.
Otherwise here is a summary and some opinions:
This basically keeps Adobe fully in the internet video business. With the new standards compliant H.264 codec, AAC audio support, and other code updates, several things happen:
- They have achieved full screen HD quality video in software
- Flash video doesn’t have to mean worrying about transcoding to the proprietary FLV format (Sorrensen or On2 VP6)
- Hardware support in the future is now possible
- You could imagine video conferencing with iChat (also H.264) as a possibility now
- They mention iTunes and AAC format a few times (web based iTunes possibilities)
- Much improved audio processing and filtering in general
- 3GP (which is also H.264) is also used by a lot of cell phones (Nokia), so there is synergy there
Overall, this just further extends the exciting possibilities that Flash video has created for the internet ( can you say YouTube )
