Adobe launches Flash Player with streaming HD support
Friday, December 7th, 2007 |From Betanews.com: Adobe just released their new Flash Player 9 Update 3 (aka. Moviestar) with added support for streaming HD content. No doubt this is somehow related to the news that YouTube is on the brink of releasing YouTube HD to the masses.
The addition of HD support comes with the inclusion of the H.264 codec previously used by Apple’s QuickTime player and featured on some Blue-Ray and HD-DVD discs. This codec is cleaner than the On2 VP6 codec introduced with Flash 8 and supports High Efficiency AAC audio.
The new player update allows for hardware acceleration allowing your computer’s graphics card to handle the video content rather than the pure software handing of earlier versions.
Hulu, the so-called “YouTube Killer” from NBC Universal and News Corp, will feature this new technology once it launches (it’s currently in Beta).
Flash video has become the chosen format for spreading video online and with the added H.264 support and streaming HD the gap between web video and “regular” TV gets ever smaller. And on a side note it’ll be interesting to see if it fixes the compression, strobing and buffering problems that are currently plaguing internet video.
