Adobe brings hi-def video to Flash

Adobe's Flash may be the de facto standard for web video at this point but that doesn't mean that the streaming player can't use a new coat of paint from time to time. To that end, the company is set to announce a new version of Adobe Flash Player--tellingly code-named "Moviestar"--that will add support for the H.264, the video compression standard favored by MPEG 4, Blu-ray, HD DVD and the iPhone. What's more, the new version of Flash Player will be able to take advantage of hardware acceleration, will be optimized for dual-core machines and will support the more efficient HE-AAC version 2 audio codec.

You'll recall that YouTube--one of the most visible users of Flash streaming video--recently started re-encoding much of its library of videos in H.264 at the behest of Apple, for use on the iPhone. As anyone who's seen the iPhone can surely tell you, those re-encoded videos look great, so it's good news that we can probably look forward to similar quality on non-iPhone YouTube as well. The new version of Flash Player is available as a beta now--the new features will be made officially available in an update to Flash Player 9 in the fall.

For more on the new Flash Player beta:
- see this ZDnet article