Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2 (MovieStar): H.264, HE-ACC support

This is huge news for web video and for Flash in general. As a result this has been already covered a lot, but if you are blogging about Flash or web, you cannot skip this kind of news.

Here are some links:

• What just happened to video on the web? by Tinic Uro
• Big day for web video: Adobe announces support for H.264 and HE-AAC in Flash Player, and Moviestar premieres on Adobe Labs by Emmy Huang
• The H.264 Announcement in Black and White by Ryan Steward
• New Flash Player plays MP4s, Quicktime video, even music from your iPod! by Aral Balkan
• The Bomb: Flash Player To Support H.264 Video by Stefan Richter (Flashcomguru)
• Flash Player to support H.264 video (FlashMagazine)

Here are my notes:

• Build number for this version (Beta 2) is 9.0.60.184. Update 3 Beta 1 was released in June (build 9.0.60.120). Release is expected 'later this Fall' (for the northern hemisphere).
• Available at Adobe Labs. Windows installer size increase is around 200 KB, haven't checked the player size yet. Because only browser players are available these new features/codecs won't work inside Flash (which uses an internal player). Update: The toll is around 100 KB.
• H.264 video (ISO/IEC 14496-12, ISO/IEC 14496-10, ISO/IEC 14496-3) and HE-ACC v2 audio support (also hardware accelerated fullscreen video for Linux) is new. Multi-core and hardware accelerated fullscreen video support also applies to the new H.264. I was somewhat expecting a move like this from Adobe, as Silverlight had a strong point about video, but I was, too, surprised as many to see this so soon.
• This is huge because these are industry standard codecs also used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
• We'll be able to play .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov and .3gp files with the new Player (Xvid, DivX not supported). There will be no need to install Quicktime (and I don't) for viewing Quicktime video.
• I'm not sure about the future of FLV format as a container format. But it will be around and current codecs will, of course, be supported at least for backwards compatibility. You can even have H.264 in a FLV but this is 'not encouraged'. I'm a bit sorry about this.
• The new codecs also mean AIR desktop applications will be able to deliver standard HD quality content.

Speaking of AIR, also on the Adobe Labs you can now find beta 1 of Adobe AIR update for Flash CS3 which lets you target AIR from within Flash CS3.