In an announcement today, Adobe says it will make the H.264 video codec part of the widely used Flash player. What does this mean? The same high-quality video compression used on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD videos will now be available on the Web, with full-screen playback features. While Flash video has been good enough for 4×3 news content on the Web, you haven’t seen too much high quality 16×9 video in Flash. QuickTime had offered higher quality, and started supporting H.264 with QuickTime 7. Today’s move from Flash is a huge leap forward for HD quality video streaming, and more evidence that HD video distribution will not be unique to broadcasters. More on this announcement from NewTeeVee. If you want to get technical, check out this post.


